31822019413558 


LIBRARY 


OF 

CALIFORNIA 
SAN  DIEGO 


IEQ.9, 


Central  University  Library 

University  of  California,  San  Diego 
Please  Note:  This  item  is  subject  to  recall. 

Date  Due 


JAN  1  7  1995 

JAN  0  7  1935 

Cl  39  (7/93) 

UCSD  Lib. 

LAST  LETTERS 
FROM  THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN 


BY   ELSA   BARKER 

LETTERS   FROM   A   LIVING   DEAD    MAN 

WAR   LETTERS   FROM   THE  LIVING  DEAD 

MAN 

SONGS   OF  A   VAGROM  ANGEL 

LAST   LETTERS   FROM  THE  LIVING  DEAD 

MAN 

THE  SON   OF  MARY  BETHEL 
THE  FROZEN  GRAIL 
THE   BOOK   OF   LOVE 

STORIES    FROM    THE    NEW    TESTAMENT 
FOR  CHILDREN 


LAST  LETTERS 

FEOM  THE 

LIVING  DEAD  MAN 


WRITTEN  DOWN 
BY 

ELSA   BARKER 


WITH    AN    INTRODUCTION 


NEW  YORK 

MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 
1919 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY 
MITCHELL  KENNKRLET 


PRINTED  IN  AMERICA  BT 
J.  J.  LITTLE  ft  IVES  COMPANY 


CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION  7 
LETTER 

I  THE  GENIUS  OF  AMERICA  49 

II  FEAR  NOT  54 

in  THE   PROMISE  OF  SPRING  61 

IV  THE  DIET  OF  GOLD  67 

V  CONTINGENT  FEES  71 

VI  THE  THREE  APPEALS  74 

VII  THE   BUILDERS  76 

VIII  THE  WORLD  OF  MIND  88 

ix  AMERICA'S  GOOD  FRIDAY  95 

X  THE  CRUCIBLE  97 

XI  MAKE  CLEAN  YOUR  HOUSE  103 

XII  LEVEL  HEADS  109 

XIII  TREES  AND  BRICK  WALLS  112 

XIV  INVISIBLE  ARMIES  114 
XV  THE  WEAKEST  LINK  118 

XVI  A  COUNCIL  IN  THE  FOREST  123 

XVII  THE  IDEAL  OF  SUCCESS  140 

XVIII  ORDER  AND   PROGRESS  147 


CONTENTS 

XIX  THE  FEDERATION  OF  NATIONS  155 

XX  THE   NEW   IDEAL  159 

XXI  A   RAMBLING   TALK  166 

XXII  THE   LEVER   OF   WORLD   UNITY  171 

XXIII  THE   STARS   OF   MAN'S   DESTINY  179 

XXIV  MELANCHOLY  182 
XXV  COMPENSATORY   PLAY  190 

XXVI  THE   AQUARIAN  AGE  198 

XXVII  THE   WATCHERS  209 

XXVIII  A   RITUAL   OF   FELLOWSHIP  216 

XXIX  RECRUITING   AGENTS  218 

XXX  THE  VIRUS   OF   DISRUPTION  227 

XXXI  THE  ALTAR  FIRE  235 


LAST  LETTERS  FROM  THE 
LIVING  DEAD  MAN 

INTRODUCTION 

fT^HIS  book,  the  third  and  last  of  the 
j|_  Living  Dead  Man  series,  was  writ- 
ten between  February,  1917,  and  Febru- 
ary, 1918.  Then  I  lost  the  ability — or  per- 
haps I  should  say  the  inclination — to  do 
automatic  writing. 

As  this  third  manuscript  was  shorter 
than  the  other  two,  I  had  supposed  it  to  be 
a  fragment  which  would  probably  never 
be  finished;  and  it  was  not  until  my  pub- 
lisher urged  me  to  issue  it  as  a  fragment 
that  I  read  it  all  over  for  the  first  time 
and  discovered  that  it  was  really  a  com- 
plete thing,  an  organic  whole. 


8        LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

"Perhaps,"  I  told  myself,  surprised 
and  still  half-incredulous,  "there  is  a  di- 
vinity that  shapes  our  ends."  For  had 
this  book  been  published  when  it  was  writ- 
ten, it  would  have  seemed  premature ;  now 
the  greater  part  of  it  is  timely  as  yester- 
day's editorials. 

For  the  benefit  of  those  who  have  not 
read  the  earlier  books  of  the  series,  "Let- 
ters From  a  Living  Dead  Man,"  1914, 
and  "War  Letters  From  the  Living  Dead 
Man,"  1915,  I  will  quote  from  the  Intro- 
ductions of  those  books.  In  the  first  In- 
troduction I  said : 


"One  night  last  year  in  Paris  I  was 
strongly  impelled  to  take  up  a  pencil  and 
write,  though  what  I  was  to  write  about 
I  had  no  idea.  Yielding  to  the  impulse, 
my  hand  was  seized  as  if  from  the  out- 
side, and  a  remarkable  message  of  a  per- 
sonal nature  came,  followed  by  the  signa- 
ture 'X.' 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN     9 

"The  purport  of  the  message  was  clear, 
but  the  signature  puzzled  me. 

"The  following  day  I  showed  this  writ- 
ing to  a  friend,  asking  her  if  she  had  any 
idea  who  'X'  was. 

;  'Why,'  she  replied,  'don't  you  know 
that  that  is  what  we  always  call  Mr. ?' 

"I  did  not  know. 

"Now,  Mr. was  six  thousand  miles 

from  Paris,  and,  as  we  supposed,  in  the 
land  of  the  living.  But  a  day  or  two  later 
a  letter  came  to  me  from  America,  stating 

that  Mr. had  died  in  the  western  part 

of  the  United  States,  a  few  days  before 
I  received  in  Paris  the  automatic  message 
signed  'X.' 

"So  far  as  I  know,  I  was  the  first  per- 
son in  Europe  to  be  informed  of  his  death, 
and  I  immediately  called  on  my  friend  to 
tell  her  that  'X'  had  passed  out.  She  did 
not  seem  surprised,  and  told  me  that  she 
had  felt  certain  of  it  some  days  before, 
when  I  had  shown  her  the  'X'  letter, 
though  she  had  not  said  so  at  the  time. 

"Naturally  I  was  impressed  by  this  ex- 
traordinary incident.  .  .  . 

"But  to  the  whole  subject  of  communi- 
cation between  the  two  worlds  I  felt  an 


10      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

unusual  degree  of  indifference.  Spirit- 
ualism had  always  left  me  quite  cold,  and 
I  had  not  even  read  the  ordinary  standard 
works  on  the  subject.  .  .  . 

"Several  letters  signed  'X'  were  auto- 
matically written  during  the  next  few 
weeks;  but,  instead  of  becoming  enthusi- 
astic, I  developed  a  strong  disinclination 
for  this  manner  of  writing,  and  was  only 
persuaded  to  continue  it  through  the  argu- 
ments of  my  friend  that  if  'X'  really 
wished  to  communicate  with  the  world,  I 
was  highly  privileged  in  being  able  fto 
help  him.  .  .  . 

"Gradually,  as  I  conquered  my  strong 
prejudice  against  automatic  writing,  I  be- 
came interested  in  the  things  which  'X' 
told  me  about  the  life  beyond  the 
grave.  .  .  . 

"When  it  was  first  suggested  that  these 
letters  should  be  published  with  an  in- 
troduction by  me,  I  did  not  take  very  en- 
thusiastically to  the  idea.  Being  the  au- 
thor of  several  books,  more  or  less  well 
known,  I  had  my  little  vanity  as  to  the 
stability  of  my  literary  reputation.  I  did 
not  wish  to  be  known  as  an  eccentric,  a 
'freak.'  But  I  consented  to  write  an  in- 


THE  LIFINa  DEAD  M'AN  11 

troduction  stating  that  the  letters  were 
automatically  written  in  my  presence, 
which  would  have  been  the  truth,  though 
not  all  the  truth.  This  satisfied  my 
friend;  but  as  time  went  on,  it  did  not 
satisfy  me.  It  seemed  not  quite  sin- 
cere. 

"I  argued  the  matter  out  with  myself. 
.  .  .  The  letters  were  probably  two-thirds 
written  before  this  question  was  finally 
settled;  and  I  decided  that  if  I  published 
the  letters  at  all,  I  should  publish  them 
with  a  frank  introduction,  stating  the  ex- 
act circumstances  of  their  reception  by 
me." 

The  interest  aroused  by  "Letters  From 
a  Living  Dead  Man,"  which  had  been 
published  simultaneously  in  London  and 
New  York,  astonished  me.  Requests  for 
translation  rights  began  to  come  in,  and 
I  was  flooded  with  letters  from  all  parts 
of  the  world.  I  answered  as  many  as  I 
could,  but  to  answer  all  was  quite  impos- 
sible. 


12      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

Now  I  will  quote  again,  briefly,  from 
the  Introduction  to  the  second  volume, 
"War  Letters  From  the  Living  Dead 
Man,"  1915. 

"In  that  first  book  of  'X'  I  did  not  state 
who  the  writer  was,  not  feeling  at  liberty 
to  do  so  without  the  consent  of  his  fam- 
ily; but  in  the  summer  of  1914,  while  I 
was  still  living  in  Europe,  a  long  inter- 
view with  Mr.  Bruce  Hatch  appeared  in 
the  'New  York  Sunday  World,'  in  which 
he  expressed  the  conviction  that  the  'Let- 
ters' were  genuine  communications  from 
his  father,  the  late  Judge  David  P.  Hatch, 
of  Los  Angeles,  California.  .  .  . 

"After  the  Letters  were  finished  in 
1913,  during  a  period  of  about  two  years 
I  was  conscious  of  the  presence  of  'X' 
only  on  two  or  three  occasions,  when  he 
wrote  some  brief  advice  in  regard  to  my 
personal  affairs. 

"On  the  fourth  of  February,  1915,  in 
New  York,  I  was  suddenly  made  aware 
one  day  that  'X'  stood  in  the  room  and 
wished  to  write;  but  as  always  before, 
with  one  or  two  exceptions,  I  had  not  the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  13 

remotest  idea  of  what  he  was  going  to 
say.    He  wrote  as  follows: 

"  'When  I  come  back  and  tell  you  the 
story  of  this  war,  as  seen  from  the  other 
side,  you  will  know  more  than  all  the 
Chancelleries  of  the  nations.'  * 

Then  I  went  on  to  describe  the  process 
of  my  automatic  writing,  adding: 

"No  person  who  had  had  even  a  minute 
fraction  of  my  occult  experience  could 
be  more  coldly  critical  of  that  experience 
than  I  am.  I  freely  welcome  every  logi- 
cal argument  against  the  belief  that  these 
letters  are  what  they  purport  to  be;  but 
placing  those  arguments  in  opposition  to 
the  evidence  which  I  have  of  the  genuine- 
ness of  them,  the  affirmations  outweigh 
the  denials,  and  I  accept  them.  This 
evidence  is  too  complex  and  much  of  it 
too  personal  to  be  even  outlined  here." 

The  second  volume,  which  dealt  with 
the  war  from  the  hidden  side  of  things, 
and  predicted  the  victory  of  the  Allies, 


14      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

aroused  even  more  interest  than  the  first 
one.  The  flood  of  letters  continued. 

In  1916,  at  the  kind  insistence  of 
Joyce  Kilmer,  I  published  another  and 
different  little  book  of  automatic  writ- 
ings, "Songs  of  a  Vagrom  Angel,"  the 
angel  being  the  Beautiful  Being  described 
by  "X"  in  the  Living  Dead  Man  books. 
The  "Songs"  were  charmingly  received  by 
the  critics.  The  whole  book,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  three  of  the  songs,  had  been 
"written  down"  in  twenty-two  hours. 

In  the  summer  of  1916  I  went  to  Cali- 
fornia, and  it  was  there,  in  February, 
1917,  that  the  writing  of  this  third  book 
began. 

But  I  was  growing  more  and  more 
restive  at  the  swamping  of  my  literary 
career  by  automatic  writings,  and  my 
mountainous  correspondence  left  me  less 
and  less  time  for  original  work.  Finally, 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  15 

in  February,  1918,  the  "inner  conflict" 
culminated  in  a  complete  cessation  of  au- 
tomatic writing. 

The  artist  in  me  had  become  exasper- 
ated. If  the  reader  will  permit  the  ex- 
aggeration of  the  simile,  I  felt  as  a  man 
might  feel  who  was  caught  between  the 
jaws  of  a  lion  that  was  carrying  him 
away  into  a  trackless  jungle.  Before 
March,  1914, 1  had  been  known  as  a  poet 
and  a  novelist;  since  1914  my  name  had 
become  known  in  more  countries  than  I 
have  counted  as  a  "psychic,"  a  medium  of 
communication  between  the  visible  and 
the  invisible  worlds.  I  was  not  sorry  that 
I  had  published  the  books,  because  so 
many  people  had  written  me  that  I  had 
saved  them  from  despair  and  even  suicide; 
but  I  shrank  from  the  publicity  they 
brought  me.  I  have  been  nearly  devoured 
by  these  books  and  the  readers  of  these 


16      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

books.  I  felt,  in  February,  1918,  that  I 
had  a  right  to  say  that  the  incident  was 
closed. 

But  that  did  not  mean  a  cessation 
of  correspondence.  Suffering  souls  to 
whose  letters  the  limitations  of  time  and 
uncertain  health  (for  I  had  not  been  well 
since  1915)  made  it  impossible  to  respond 
by  return  of  post,  would  write  again  re- 
proaching me  with  indifference  to  their 
sufferings.  The  situation  had  become  in- 
conceivable. And  if  I  went  out  some- 
where for  an  hour  or  two  of  social  "rest," 
I  was  surrounded  by  people  who  wanted 
me  to  talk  to  them  about  the  "X"  books, 
about  their  own  dead  friends,  and  the 
possibilities  of  communication. 

I  was  torn  by  pity  for  those  who  were 
suffering,  and  after  years  of  war  nearly 
everyone  was  suffering;  but  I  wanted  to 
be  at  the  front  with  the  Red  Cross,  and 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  17 

my  health  would  not  permit  me  to  go. 
I  could  help  various  war  committees,  but 
I  could  not  go  to  my  tortured  and  beloved 
France — to  be  perhaps  an  added  burden, 
should  I  break  down  altogether. 

The  only  escape  from  this  conflict  was 
in  abstruse  studies,  studies  where  pure 
mind  can  work.  So  I  seriously  took  up 
Analytical  Psychology,  in  which  I  had 
been  mildly  interested  since  1915.  Some 
fourteen  hours  a  day  for  a  year  I  studied, 
some  of  the  time  with  a  teacher,  some  of 
the  time  alone.  I  burrowed  under  the 
theories  of  the  three  great  schools,  and 
synthesized  them,  after  my  fashion.  I 
had  rather  an  active  mind  to  experiment 
upon — my  own.  The  "resistances,"  so- 
called,  had  been  broken  down  by  the 
teacher. 

One  of  the  things  which  appealed  most 
to  my  reason  was  Jung's  insistence  upon 


18      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

the  psychological   (and  therefore  practi- 
cal) value  of  the  irrational.     He  says: 

"There  is  no  human  foresight  nor 
philosophy  which  can  enable  us  to  give 
our  lives  a  prescribed  direction,  except  for 
quite  a  short  distance.  Destiny  lies  be- 
fore us,  perplexing  us,  and  teeming  with 
possibilities,  and  yet  only  one  of  these 
many  possibilities  is  our  own  particular 
right  way.  .  .  .  Much  can  certainly  be  at- 
tained by  will-power.  But  .  .  .  our  will 
is  a  function  that  is  directed  by  our  pow- 
ers of  reflection.  .  .  .  Has  it  ever  been 
proved,  or  can  it  ever  be  proved,  that  life 
and  destiny  harmonize  with  our  human 
reason,  that  is,  that  they  are  exclusively 
rational?  On  the  contrary,  we  have 
ground  for  supposing  that  they  are  also 
irrational,  that  is  to  say,  that  in  the  last 
resort  they  too  are  based  in  regions  be- 
yond the  human  reason.  The  irrational- 
ity of  the  great  process  is  shown  by  its 
so-called  accidentalness.  .  .  .  The  rich 
store  of  life  both  is,  and  is  not,  determined 
by  law ;  it  is  at  the  same  time  rational  and 
irrational.  Therefore,  the  reason  and  the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  19 

will  founded  upon  it  are  only  valid  for  a 
short  distance.  The  further  we  extend 
this  rationally  chosen  direction,  the  surer 
we  may  be  that  we  are  thereby  excluding 
the  irrational  possibilities  of  life,  which 
have,  however,  just  as  good  a  right  to  be 
lived.  Aye,  we  may  injure  ourselves, 
since  we  cut  off  the  wealth  of  accidental 
eventualities  by  a  too  rigid  and  conscious 
direction.  .  .  .  The  present  fearful  ca- 
tastrophic world-war  has  tremendously 
upset  the  most  optimistic  upholder  of 
rationalism  and  culture." 

Now  my  rationally  chosen  "line  of  life" 
had  been  that  of  writing  books  of  poetry, 
fiction  and  essays.  But  "accidentalness" 
cut  in,  and  I  wrote  automatically  and  pub- 
lished what  I  had  written.  That  destiny, 
that  second  line  of  life,  may  also  have 
been,  for  all  we  can  prove  to  the  contrary, 
based  "in  regions  beyond  the  human  rea- 
son." 

I  should  not  like  to  say  that  my  having 
led  the  way,  in  the  spring  of  1914,  for 


20      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

writers  of  dignified  reputation  to  publish 
their  automatic  writings  might  have  been 
causally  directed  by  the  coming  great  need 
of  the  world  for  spiritual  consolation  dur- 
ing the  most  awful  holocaust  in  history. 
That  would  be  pressing  irrationality  too 
far. 

But  that  second  line  of  life,  as  Jung 
would  call  it,  came  to  its  inevitable  end 
with  the  last  of  this  manuscript  in  Febru- 
ary, 1918.  The  cause  of  that  was  also 
seemingly  accidental.  But  as  this  Intro- 
duction is  only  an  introduction,  it  is  im- 
possible to  follow  the  course  of  all  the 
drops  of  water  in  the  broad  river  that  has 
flowed  under  my  mental  bridges  during 
the  last  fourteen  months. 

My  present  line  of  life  (and  through  the 
analysis  of  my  dreams  I  have  means  of 
knowing  what  it  is)  points  to  the  resump- 
tion of  my  original  literary  work,  poetry, 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  21 

fiction  and  essays,  and  to  the  exclusion, 
so  far  as  possible,  of  everything  that  would 
deflect  me  from  that  course.  "Acciden- 
tally" will  cut  in  from  time  to  time, 
change  of  place  and  therefore  change  of 
outlook,  studies  of  all  sorts,  and  legiti- 
mate demands  by  that  society  of  which  I 
form  a  part ;  but  I  have  done  enough  auto- 
matic writing.  Others  will  do  it,  if  it 
must  be  done ;  and  probably  it  must — be- 
cause it  is  an  outlet  which  it  might  be 
unsafe  to  stop  up  in  the  present  state  of 
the  race  consciousness. 

Of  course  if  I  should  feel  strongly  im- 
pelled to  do  automatic  writing,  I  should 
do  it,  trusting  to  that  destiny  which  is  an- 
other name  for  causes  beyond  our  compre- 
hension; but  it  was  the  strength  of  my 
"inner  protest"  that  made  me  realize  that 
I  had  gone  far  enough  along  that  line. 

As  in  the   forewords   to   the   former 


22      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

books,  I  state  the  psychological  situation 
of  the  moment,  saying,  "so  and  so  hap- 
pened." The  reader,  as  before,  will  in- 
terpret in  his  own  way.  This  introduction 
indicates  my  point  of  view  in  the  month  of 
April,  1919.  Before  the  month  of  May, 
2019,  I  shall  have  solved  the  problem  of 
survival,  or  demonstrated  (without  know- 
ing it)  that  it  is  insoluble. 

The  more  we  know  about  all  these 
things,  the  less  likely  we  are  to  assume 
that  we  have  the  sum  of  all  knowledge. 
We  are  like  children,  groping  among  psy- 
chological lights  and  shadows. 

My  own  belief  in  immortality  seems 
ineradicable.  I  did  not  know  that  until 
it  was  tested  out.  But  we  must  always 
remember  that  our  personal  belief  is  not 
absolute  evidence  of  the  truth  of  what  we 
believe — at  least  until  we  shall  have  ex- 
amined all  the  psychological  roots  of  the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  28 

belief,  and  in  the  present  state  of  our 
knowledge  that  is  well-nigh  impossible. 
Our  rational  belief,  if  we  have  formed 
one  for  ourselves  and  have  not  merely 
accepted  uncritically  the  beliefs  of  our 
predecessors  and  associates,  is  merely  our 
individual  synthesis.  But  we  must  not 
give  an  exaggerated  value  even  to  our  own 
hard-won  synthesis.  That  also  is  a  mov- 
ing, an  ever-changing,  thing.  Otherwise 
we  should  not  grow.  When  a  man  be- 
comes fixed  he  begins  to  disintegrate. 

In  the  first  book  of  this  series  I  stated 
the  fact  that  I  had  never  been  interested 
in  spiritualism.  Consciously,  I  never  had. 
Now,  Dr.  Alfred  Adler,  the  head  of  what 
we  may  call  the  Ego  School  of  analysis, 
says:  "Often  the  negation  is  the  asser- 
tion of  an  old  interest  that  has  become  un- 
conscious." Yes.  .  .  .  My  father  was 
deeply  interested  in  spiritualism,  and  I 


24      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

was  born  in  an  old  house  where  ghosts 
were  supposed  to  walk.  My  mother  was 
afraid  of  the  subject.  My  father  died 
when  I  was  thirteen.  I  was  always  a 
little  afraid  of  my  father.  The  first  time 
I  met  Judge  Hatch  I  told  him  that  per- 
haps he  had  been  my  father  in  a  "former 
incarnation."  He  smiled,  and  said, 
"Maybe." 

No  microscopist  had  ever  a  greater  in- 
terest in  facts  than  I  have.  My  scientific 
friends  say,  "A  scientist  was  lost  in  you." 
Other  friends  say,  "You  are  a  great 
psychic."  So  there  I  found  myself.  In 
studying  with  the  scientific  half  the 
phenomena  of  the  psychic  half,  I  am  able 
to  unify  them. 

The  authority  of  the  Church  has  been 
knocked  from  under  us.  We  are  adrift, 
we  thinking  humans  of  the  early  twenti- 
eth century,  upon  a  sea  of  mind,  storm- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  25 

tossed  by  winds  of  feeling.  We  were  just 
beginning  to  believe  in  universal  brother- 
hood— when  universal  war  broke  out. 
Our  steersman  seemed  to  have  been 
washed  overboard.  Everybody  wants  to 
take  the  helm,  distrusting  his  neighbor's 
judgment.  Is  it  any  wonder  that  be- 
wildered souls  by  thousands  turned  to 
automatic  writing,  seeking  for  guidance, 
for  something  authoritative?  In  child- 
hood our  parents  guided  us.  Later  the 
Church  guided  us — or  tried  to.  Then 
science  guided  us — a  little  too  far.  And 
in  the  reaction  we  turned  inward,  to 
find  (sometimes)  the  unconscious  more 
troubled  than  the  conscious.  But  in  the 
Letters  which  follow  there  is  no  despair, 
only  light  and  courage  and  hope. 

There  seem  to  be  two  main  streams  in 
us,  the  mental  and  the  instinctive.  Berg- 
son  says,  in  his  "Creative  Evolution," 


26      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

"There  are  things  which  intelligence  alone 
is  able  to  seek,  but  which,  by  itself,  it  will 
never  find.  These  things  instinct  alone 
could  find;  but  it  will  never  seek  them." 
It  was  inevitable  that  modern  psy- 
chology, with  its  constructive  curiosity, 
should  turn  its  attention  to  the  religious 
beliefs  of  the  past  and  present.  There 
was  no  other  way  of  understanding  what 
really  goes  on  in  the  minds  of  people. 
Some  of  these  old  beliefs  proved,  on  ex- 
amination, to  be  scientifically  tenable. 
For  instance,  the  Theosophists  (who  got 
the  idea  from  the  Hindoos)  tell  us  there 
are  two  streams  of  evolution,  the  elemental 
and  the  human.  Dr.  C.  J.  Jung,  the  head 
of  the  Swiss  school  of  Analytical  Psy- 
chology, divides  the  stream  of  "energy" 
into  two  currents,  one  going  forward  and 
one  going  backward.  And  this  duality  of 
will  Bleuler  calls  "ambitendency."  The 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  27, 

difference  is  chiefly  a  difference  of  phrase- 
ology and  associations. 

"Always  the  pull  of  the  opposites,"  I 
quote  from  the  Letters  which  follow.  The 
present  psychic  wave  which  is  sweeping 
over  the  world  is  accompanied  by  modern 
analytical  psychology.  Truth  may  lie  in 
the  synthesis. 

Between  the  credulity  of  those  who  be- 
lieve everything  purporting  to  come  from 
the  other  side  of  the  veil,  who  accept  every 
suggestion  from  anybody  claiming  to  be 
"psychic"  who  half-closes  the  eyes  and 
says  dreamily,  "You  will  do  so  and  so," 
— between  this  thirst  for  delusion  and  the 
materialists'  denial  that  there  is  anything 
but  matter  and  the  functions  of  matter, 
there  is  also  a  middle  ground. 

The  great  pioneer  of  analytical  psy- 
chology himself  said,  in  a  recent  little 
volume  on  "War  and  Death,"  translated 


28      LAST  LETTERS.  FROM 

by  Dr.  A.  A.  Brill:  "In  the  unconscious 
every  one  of  us  is  convinced  of  his  own 
immortality."  Suppose  the  unconscious 
'should  be  right? 

And,  by  the  way,  between  the  state- 
ment of  Christian  Scientists,  "All  is  love," 
and  the  statement  of  the  parent  school  of 
psychoanalysis,  "All  is  libido,"  there  is 
striking  similarity. 

Jung  would  say,  "All  is  energy." 
Judge  Hatch  wrote,  in  a  little  book  pub- 
lished in  1905,  "We  postulate  immortal 
Units  of  Force,  each  having  the  power 
to  generate  a  constant  but  limited  amount 
of  energy,  and  no  two  alike  in  quantity. 
Upon  this  force  generation  in  the  unit, 
necessitated  by  law,  do  we  base  life.  Life 
results  from  the  inter-dealing  and  inter- 
playing  of  these  units  among  themselves 
eternally,  sometimes  potential,  again  ki- 
netic, each  limited  in  the  amount  of  force 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  29 

generated,  but  unlimited  in  variety  of  mo- 
tion, manifestation  or  specialization." 

Truth  may  indeed  be  one,  though  the 
roads  to  it  are  many. 

Fechner's  assertion,  that  the  dead  live 
in  us  and  so  influence  us,  does  not  require 
much  stretching  to  fit  the  hypothesis  that 
the  entire  past  of  the  human  race  is  con- 
tained in  the  deeper  levels  of  the  uncon- 
scious. If  we  go  deep  enough  in  analysis 
that  hypothesis  is  illustrated  by  strange 
phenomena. 

It  is  unwise,  at  the  present  time  more 
than  any  other,  even  to  try  to  take  away 
man's  belief  in  immortality.  The  world 
is  too  sad,  too  near  the  ragged  edge  where 
personal  uncertainty  drifts  into  social  ir- 
responsibility. The  psychic  wave  that  is 
sweeping  over  the  world,  though  it  is  be- 
ing carried  to  excess,  as  all  over-compen- 
sations are,  answers  nevertheless  to  a  tre- 


mendous  need.    Credulity  is  the  other  end 
of  doubt. 

Dr.  Smith  Ely  Jelliffe,  in  the  Intro- 
duction to  his  translation  of  Silberer's 
"Problems  of  Mysticism  and  Its  Symbol- 
ism," says: 

?<Much  of  the  strange  and  outre,  as  well 
as  the  commonplace,  in  human  activity 
conceals  energy  transformations  of  in- 
estimable value  in  the  work  of  sublimation. 
The  race  would  go  mad  without  it.  It 
sometimes  does  even  with  it,  a  sign  that 
sublimation  is  still  imperfect  and  that  the 
race  is  far  from  being  spiritually  well. 
A  comprehension  of  the  principles  here 
involved  would  further  the  spread  of 
sympathy  for  all  forms  of  thinking  and 
tend  to  further  spiritual  health  in  such 
mutual  comprehension  of  the  needs  of 
others  and  of  the  forms  taken  by  sublima- 
tion processes." 

William  James  defended  the  Christian 
Scientists.  And  Jung  himself  says,  in  one 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN.  81 

of  his  famous  letters  to  Dr.  Loy,  "Every 
method  is  good  if  it  serves  its  purpose,  in- 
cluding Christian  Science,  Mental  Heal- 
ing, etc." 

During  the  last  five  years  man  has  had 
such  varied  reasons  for  fearing  objective 
things  that  he  has  come  to  fear  the  sub- 
jective, perhaps  even  more  than  during 
the  Middle  Ages. 

Dr.  H.  W.  Prink  says,  in  his  masterly 
book  on  "Morbid  Fears  and  Compul- 
sions": "The  biological  function  or  pur- 
pose of  fear  is  protective  or  preservative. 
Every  one  of  us  alive  to-day  owes  his  ex- 
istence to  the  fact  that  his  human  and  pre- 
human ancestors  were  afraid." 

Nearly  everyone  is  afraid  of  something. 
Sublime  Jeanne  d'Arc  was  terribly  afraid 
of  the  fire.  (Perhaps  she  had  been  badly 
burned  in  infancy,  and  the  unconscious 
memory  twisted  and  turned  in  the  deeps 


32      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

of  her  pure  soul.  Perhaps,  and  perhaps 
.  .  .  for  we  shall  never  know.) 

When  we  really  know  what  fear  is,  we 
shall  have  solved  the  mystery  of  "the  one 
and  the  many"  that  disturbed  the  cerebra- 
tion of  our  ancestors.  Fear  may  be  a 
momentary  surging  up  of  the  ego's  con- 
sciousness of  its  own  helpless  littleness 
before  the  immensity  of  the  unknown  and 
unknowable  non-ego.  The  reckless  cour- 
age of  the  soldier  may  be  an  over-com- 
pensation, a  triumphant  sublimation — 
sometimes  followed  by  reaction,  secret  or 
unconcealable,  depending  on  the  intensity. 

For,  as  Silberer  says,  "The  conflicts  do 
not  indeed  lie  in  the  external  world,  but 
in  our  emotional  disposition  towards  it;  if 
we  change  this  disposition  by  an  inner 
development,  the  external  world  has  a  dif- 
ferent value.  .  .  ." 

Man   is   indeed  his   own   cosmos,   the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  33 

microcosm  of  the  macrocosm,  to  a  degree 
incomprehensible  to  one  who  has  not  in- 
telligently studied  (and  in  himself)  the 
phenomena  of  "projection,"  and  compen- 
sation including  sublimation. 

The  great  mystics  of  all  ages,  through 
introversion,  having  discovered  this  and 
reduced  it  to  a  science,  after  their  fash- 
ion, great  modern  scientists  like  Jung  and 
Silberer  have  found  their  systems  worthy 
of  profound  study. 

Writing  of  mysticism,  Professor  Dwel- 
shauvers  of  Brussels  says : 

"The  effects  of  mystic  union  are  logical 
and  coherent;  a  second  quality  of  the  acts 
of  the  order  of  grace  is  the  positive  charac- 
ter of  the  contribution,  the  increase  which 
they  bring  to  the  psychic  life  of  those  who 
benefit  by  them.  .  .  .  The  idea  of  God, 
the  divine  presence,  or  any  other  form  of 
inspiration,  is  no  more  strange  to  the  mind 
of  the  religious  man  than  is  for  the  savant 
the  sudden  conception  of  a  solution  long 


34      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

sought  for,  or  for  the  artist  the  vision  of 
the  work  which  he  meditates  and  of  which 
he  pursues  the  construction  with  patience 
and  tenacity.  .  .  .  Neither  the  invasion 
of  the  soul  by  God,  nor  the  'return'  of 
the  mystics,  has  any  resemblance  to  mental 
disintegration.' ' 

It  is  not  easy  to  get  rid  of  God. 

Will  you  read  what  Jung  says  on  this 
subject  in  the  "Collected  Papers  on  An- 
alytical Psychology,"  edited  by  Dr.  Con- 
stance E.  Long: 

"The  concept  of  God  is  simply  a  neces- 
sary psychological  function.  .  .  .  The 
concensus  gentium  has  spoken  of  gods  for 
aeons  past,  and  will  be  speaking  of  them 
in  aeons  to  come.  Beautiful  and  perfect 
as  man  may  think  his  reason,  he  may 
nevertheless  assure  himself  that  it  is  only 
one  of  the  possible  mental  functions,  coin- 
ciding merely  with  the  corresponding  side 
of  the  phenomena  of  the  universe.  All 
around  is  the  irrational,  that  which  is  not 
congruous  with  reason.  And  this  irra- 
tionalism  is  likewise  a  psychological  func- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  33 

tion,  namely  the  absolute  unconscious; 
whilst  the  function  of  consciousness  is  es- 
sentially rational.  .  .  .  Heraclitus,  the 
ancient,  that  really  very  wise  man,  dis- 
covered the  most  wonderful  of  all  psycho- 
logical laws,  namely,  the  regulating  func- 
tion of  antithesis.  He  termed  this  'enan- 
tiodromia'  (clashing  together)  by  which 
he  meant  that  at  some  time  everything 
meets  with  its  opposite.  .  .  .  Man  may 
not  identify  himself  with  reason,  for  he  is 
not  wholly  a  rational  being,  and  never  can 
or  ever  will  become  one.  That  is  a  fact  of 
which  every  pedant  of  civilization  should 
talse  note.  What  is  irrational  cannot  and 
may  not  be  stamped  out.  The  gods  can- 
not and  may  not  die.  Woe  betide  those 
men  who  have  disinfected  heaven  with  ra- 
tionalism; God-Almightiness  has  entered 
into  them,  because  they  would  not  admit 
God  as  an  absolute  function.  .  .  .  Only 
he  escapes  from  the  cruel  law  of  enantio- 
dromia  who  knows  how  to  separate  him- 
self from  the  unconscious — not  by  repress- 
ing it,  for  then  it  seizes  him  from  behind 
— but  by  presenting  it  visibly  to  himself 
as  something  that  is  totally  different  from 
him.  .  .  .  He  must  learn  to  differentiate 


36      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

in  his  thoughts  Between  what  is  the  ego 
and  what  is  the  non-ego.  The  latter  is 
the  collective  psyche  or  absolute  uncon- 
scious. ...  In  order  to  differentiate  the 
psychological  ego  from  the  psychological 
non-ego,  man  must  necessarily  stand  upon 
firm  feet  in  his  ego-function.  .  .  . 

"Obviously  the  depreciation  and  repres- 
sion of  such  a  powerful  function  as  that  of 
religion  has  serious  consequences  for  the 
psychology  of  the  individual.  .  .  .  One 
period  of  skepticism  came  to  a  close  with 
the  horrors  of  the  French  revolution.  At 
the  present  time  we  are  again  experienc- 
ing an  ebullition  of  the  unconscious  de- 
structive powers  of  the  collective  psyche. 
The  result  is  an  unparalleled  general 
slaughter.  That  is  just  what  the  uncon- 
scious was  tending  towards.  This  tend- 
ency had  previously  been  inordinately 
strengthened  by  the  rationalism  of  modern 
life,  which  by  depreciating  everything  ir- 
rational caused  the  function  of  irrational- 
ism  to  sink  into  the  unconscious.  .  .  ." 

"There  is  indeed  no  possible  alterna- 
tive but  to  acknowledge  irrationalism  as  a 
psychological  function  that  is  necessary 
and  always  existent.  Its  results  are  not 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  87 

to  be  taken  as  concrete  realities  '(that 
would  involve  repression),  but  as  psycho- 
logical realities.  They  are  realities  be- 
cause they  are  effective  things,  that  is,  they 
are  actualities", 

So  we  need  not  be  ashamed  to  admit 
that  we  pray!  In  this  grim  period  of  his- 
tory, when  the  soul  is  face  to  face  witfi 
itself  and  its  brother  as  it  has  never  been, 
we  may  speak  with  a  greater  simplicity 
than  in  the  old  conventionally-smiling 
days  before  the  war.  I  pray — and  so  do 
you,  whoever  you  are,  if  only  by  groaning 
"Oh,  God!"  when  you  suffer.  Prayer  is 
an  instinct.  Even  an  atheist  will  pray,  if 
he  finds  himself  beyond  human  aid.  A 
friend  of  mine  who  was  killed  at  the  front 
used  to  take  holy  communion  every  morn- 
ing, and  he  was  doubtless  a  saner  and 
better  soldier  for  it.  One  need  not  be  a 
Roman  Catholic  to  see  the  beauty  of  that 
act  of  faith. 


38      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

Whether  God  be  a  "dominant  of  the 
superpersonal  unconscious,"  a  psycho- 
logical function,  or  a  mathematical  equa- 
tion, makes  not  the  slightest  difference  to 
me.  As  William  James  would  say,  "He 
works." 

And  whether  the  souls  of  our  dead  live 
in  us,  as  Fechner  says,  or  whether  they 
are  relics  in  the  personal  and  collective 
unconscious,  or  whether  they  are  "concrete 
realities"  that  can  materialize  by  using 
astral  and  etheric  substance,  makes  also 
not  the  slightest  difference  to  me.  If  you 
could  know  how  utterly  I  am  at  peace 
about  this  whole  question! 

And  many  other  differences  appear,  on 
close  examination,  to  be  mainly  differ- 
ences of  viewpoint  and  phraseology.  The 
"astral  world"  of  the  Theosophists,  medi- 
aeval and  modern,  corresponds  to  a  certain 
level  of  the  unconscious.  "X"  says  in  one 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  39 

of  the  Letters  which  follow,  written  in 
1917,  that  melancholy  may  be  produced  by 
the  pressure  of  the  unhappy  dead  who 
make  us  fear.  If  you  locate  the  dead 
in  the  unconscious,  which  surges  up  in 
moments  of  passivity,  the  dead  will  have 
the  same  effect. 

Having  given  much  of  the  leisure  time 
of  a  laborious  life  to  a  study  of  the  theories 
and  practices  of  mysticism  and  occultism, 
as  formulated  by  many  different  schools, 
I  could  write  volumes  (if  I  had  the  in- 
clination, which  I  have  not)  in  tracing 
out  the  psychological  roots  and  the  rela- 
tions between  these  things.  My  own  un- 
conscious is  rich  with  such  images.  Some 
of  the  most  striking  parallels  have  not 
been  written  about,  so  far  as  I  know. 

And  Jung  seems  to  have  covered,  with 
the  wide  mantle  of  his  comprehension, 


40      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

even  the  frailties  of  those  who  believe  in 
prophetic  dreams.     He  says: 

"The  unconscious  possesses  possibilities 
of  wisdom  that  are  completely  closed  to 
consciousness,  for  the  unconscious  has  at 
its  disposal  not  only  all  the  psychic  con- 
tents that  are  under  the  threshold  because 
they  have  been  forgotten  or  overlooked, 
but  also  the  wisdom  of  the  experience  of 
untold  ages,  deposited  in  the  course  of 
time  and  lying  potential  in  the  human 
brain.  The  unconscious  is  continually  ac- 
tive, creating  combinations  of  its  ma- 
terials; these  serve  to  indicate  the  future 
path  of  the  individual.  It  creates  pros- 
pective combinations  just  as  our  conscious- 
ness does,  only  they  are  considerably  su- 
perior to  the  conscious  combinations  both 
in  refinement  and  extent.  The  unconscious 
may  therefore  be  an  unparalleled  guide 
for  human  beings.  .  .  . 

"The  unconscious  must  contain  all  the 
material  that  has  not  yet  reached  the  level 
of  consciousness.  These  are  the  germs  of 
future  conscious  contents," 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  41 

He  seems  to  think  that  true  prophecies 
are  merely  the  result  of  synthesis  by  the 
unconscious  of  tendencies  (whether  in  the 
personal  or  universal  unconscious)  sig- 
nificant for  future  occurrences.  Refer- 
ring to  Maeterlinck's  "inconscient  super- 
ieur,"  he  says  of  the  prophetic  interpreta- 
tion of  dreams : 

"The  aversion  of  the  exact  sciences 
against  this  sort  of  thought-process  which 
is  hardly  to  be  called  phantastic  is  only 
an  overcompensation  of  the  thousands  of 
years  old  but  all  too  great  inclination  of 
man  to  believe  in  soothsaying." 

I  am  told  that  the  hearing  of  voices  in 
the  hypnogogic  state  indicates  "a  slight 
tendency  to  dissociation."  Very  well. 
Probably  the  voices  come  from  a  deeper 
level  than  automatic  writing,  whatever  the 
inspiration  of  automatic  writing  may  be. 

Now  while  the  things  which  "X"  in  the 


42      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

following  letters  advised  America  to  do, 
before  America  came  into  the  war,  were 
the  very  things  which  we  did  after  we 
came  into  the  war  and  which  we  could 
not  have  done  except  as  war  measures, 
our  entrance  was  not  written  down  as  a 
specific  prophecy  in  these  letters.  Any 
startling  prophecy  has  always  had  a  tend- 
ency to  shake  me  out  of  the  passive  state 
in  which  automatic  writing  is  possible. 
But — during  the  weeks  from  February  to 
April,  1917,  in  the  hypnogogic  state  pre- 
ceding sleep,  I  several  times  heard,  "We 
are  coming  into  the  war."  Of  course  I 
did  not  write  that  down  in  the  manuscript, 
as  it  was  not  a  part  of  the  manuscript. 
What  is  heard  is  heard,  what  is  written 
is  written.  I  merely  mention  it  as  a  curi- 
ous phenomenon  for  it  was  probably  the 
synthesis  of  the  deeper  levels  of  my  un- 
conscious. It  was  certainly  the  tragic 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  43 

hope  of  my  conscious  mind;  but  the  con- 
scious alone  would  not  have  produced  a 
voice. 

If  anybody  wonders  that  I  should  ad- 
mit hearing  hypnogogic  voices,  I  can  only 
say  that  I  regard  these  things  rather  ob- 
jectively and  impersonally.  I  never  hear 
voices  except  when  half -asleep.  If  my 
very  accurate  memory  has  not  slipped  a 
cog,  William  James  used  to  talk  freely  of 
his  hypnogogic  experiences.  The  more  we 
know  about  our  little  personalities,  the  less 
monstrously  important  they  seem.  And 
the  "hearing  of  voices"  has  more  than  once 
played  a  respectable  role  in  history,  before 
and  after  Moses. 

But  I  do  not  imagine  that  I  have  any 
prophetic  mission,  nor  do  I  feel  in  any 
hurry  to  "unite  myself  with  the  ocean  of 
divinity,"  nor  feel  any  impulse  violently 
to  turn  my  back  upon  the  universal.  There 


44      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

is  a  happy  mean,  which  makes  for  effi- 
ciency in  life,  for  health  and  understand- 
ing. 

I  have  touched  upon  analytical  psychol- 
ogy in  this  Introduction  because  I  am  so 
constituted  that  I  cannot  publish  this  last 
volume  of  my  automatic  writings  without 
indicating  my  point  of  view,  with  the  same 
frankness  as  in  former  Introductions. 
Please  do  not  blame  science  because  I 
have  not  lost  through  the  analytic  process 
my  instinctive  belief  in  individual  immor- 
tality. I  assure  you  it  has  not  been  the 
fault  of  science. 

If  anyone  objects  that  I  have  only 
touched  the  threads  of  this  great  web  of 
psychology  which  lead  towards  the  sub- 
ject of  this  book,  I  can  only  say  that  this 
foreword  being  by  way  of  preface  to  this 
book,  no  other  course  was  possible  on  ac- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  45 

count  of  the  limitations  of  space  and  ar- 
tistic relevancy. 

Psychology  as  a  method  of  healing  I 
leave  to  the  physicians,  who  have  written 
many  books  about  it,  containing  bibliog- 
raphies. And  booksellers  have  cata- 
logues. Anyone  interested  can  write  to 
them. 

This  is  by  way  of  excusing  myself  from 
answering  letters  of  enquiry.  I  have  un- 
selfishly and  laboriously  written  so  many 
hundreds  of  letters !  Now  I  want  to  write 
other  things.  The  resolution  of  psycho- 
logical "complexes"  frees  energy  for  sub- 
limation in  work.  It  frees  ideas  for  use  in 
art. 

Dr.  Beatrice  M.  Hinkle,  in  the  intro- 
duction to  her  translation  of  Jung's  "Psy- 
chology of  the  Unconscious,"  says  that 
"this  psychology  which  is  pervading  all 
realms  of  thought  .  .  .  seems  destined  to 


46      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

be  a  psychological-philosophical  system 
for  the  understanding  and  practical  ad- 
vancement of  human  life." 

So,  having  found  a  well  whose  waters 
were  refreshing,  I  note  the  fact — and  pass 
on. 

The  train  of  thought  which  the  reader 
has  followed  in  this  Introduction  is  the 
train  of  thought  which  led  me — after  some 
delay — to  the  publication  of  the  book. 

I  am  glad  that  these  "Last  Letters 
from  the  Living  Dead  Man"  are  a  call  to 
courage,  to  restraint,  to  faith  in  the  great 
and  orderly  future  of  America  and  the 
world,  a  call  to  all  those  positive  qualities 
so  gravely  needed  in  these  days  of  the  re- 
building of  Peace. 

For  I  do  not  believe  that  Bolshevism,  or 
any  other  form  of  lunacy,  will  find  foot- 
hold in  the  United  States.  A  nation  with 
universal  suffrage,  for  man  and  woman, 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  47 

certainly  has  no  incentive  for  a  resort  to 
insane  destruction.  In  the  last  State 
campaign  it  was  interesting  to  watch  the 
reactions  of  women  to  the  privileges  and 
duties  of  suffrage.  I  watched  it  only  in 
one  party,  the  Democratic,  but  it  was 
doubtless  everywhere  the  same.  There 
was  an  added  dignity,  a  sense  of  new  re- 
sponsibility, and  always  courtesy  and  real 
fellowship  among  the  women  and  the  men. 
Its  happening  to  correspond  in  time  with 
the  Fourth  Liberty  Loan  campaign,  and 
the  printing  of  casualty  lists,  made  it  all 
the  more  significant.  No,  these  level- 
headed, socially-responsible  women  will 
never  be  swept  away  by  collective  insan- 
ity; and  as  the  men  who  return  from  the 
front  will  return  to  these  women,  their 
mothers,  wives  and  sisters,  I  do  not  think 
that  we  shall  lose  in  peace  what  we  have 
gained  in  war. 


48      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

And  now — remembering  always  that 
this  book  was  written  between  February, 
1917,  and  February,  1918 — you  may  read 
the  "Last  Letters  from  the  Living  Dead 
Man." 

ELSA  BARKER 

New  York,  Easter  Day,  1919. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  49 


LETTER  I 

THE  GENIUS  OF  AMERICA! 

February  S,  1917. 

I  WANT  to  write  of  America,  land  of 
my  latest  birth,  land  of  the  future. 

Great  is  the  road  that  the  Genius  of 
America  may  travel,  and  her  feet  have  al- 
ready passed  the  early  stages  of  it. 

The  Genius  of  America! 

Each  land  is  watched  over  and  its  chil- 
dren guided — guided  and  moved — By  a 
Genius. 

Would  you  feel  the  Genius  of  America, 
go  alone  into  the  woods  at  night,  watch 
and  listen  and  invoke.  Perhaps  the  an- 
swer may  come,  its  recognition  of  you, 
your  recognition  of  it. 


50      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

If  you  are  one  of  those  who  can  hear  the 
words  which  the  Great  Ones  speak  in  the 
silence,  perhaps  you  will  hear  something 
with  the  ears  of  your  soul.  If  so,  do  not 
hasten  to  divulge  the  message,  but  treas- 
ure it  in  your  heart;  for  that  which  is 
treasured  in  the  heart  can  sometimes  be 
felt  and  understood  by  the  hearts  of 
others. 

If  you  are  one  of  those  who  will  serve 
willingly,  the  secret  of  your  heart  may  be 
shared  in  silence  with  those  who  can  hear 
in  the  silence. 

The  hour  approaches  wrhen  the  mission 
of  this  land  may  be  manifested.  The  hour 
approaches  when  the  Genius  of  this  land 
shall  force  its  will  upon  this  land.  That 
will  not  be  an  easy  task.  So  many  wills 
have  sought  to  wrest  the  reins  from  the 
guiding  hand ;  so  many  eyes,  looking  in  so 
many  directions,  have  seen  so  many  goals. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  51 

But  there  is  one  will  so  strong  that  it  can, 
when  its  hour  is  come,  gather  up  the  wills 
of  men  as  a  strong  wind  gathers  a  mass  of 
loosely-lying  straws  and  sweeps  them 
along. 

You  know  not  the  power  of  a  will  that 
has  God  behind  it.  You  know  not  the 
power  of  a  purpose  that  has  God  behind 
it  and  the  future  before  it.  Those  who  get 
in  the  way  of  the  Genius  of  this  land  will 
be  broken,  like  straws  that  would  resist  the 
wind. 

I  have  watched  from  my  unseen  place 
the  labors  of  many.  I  have  helped  un- 
seen with  my  faith  to  strengthen  the  hearts 
of  many.  I  shall  wait  now  unseen  till  the 
act  of  destiny  is  accomplished. 

You  who  have  followed  me  from  my 
first  gropings  in  the  twilight  of  the  new 
life,  before  the  clearness  came;  you  who 
have  followed  me  on  my  journeys 


52      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

among  the  battlefields,  both  in  and  above 
the  world,  follow  me  yet  a  little  further, 
with  your  minds  ajar  for  the  entrance  of 
the  truth  I  have  to  tell  you,  the  advice  I 
have  to  give  you.  For  my  advice  is  disin- 
terested as  the  rain,  and  my  truth  is  of- 
fered as  freely  as  the  light. 

I  have  come  a  long  way  since  I  laid 
down  my  body  a  few  brief  years  ago,  years 
of  a  crowded  brevity,  in  which  the  world 
has  moved  as  fast  as  I,  and  sometimes 
with  more  pain.  For  he  who  knows  the 
purpose  of  his  pain  can  bear  it  better  than 
the  child  who  knows  only  that  he  suffers. 

I  should  Kave«spoken  to  you  before,  but 
you  would  not  let  me.  Child  I  Would  you 
stand  in  the  way  with  your  personal 
wishes,  and  your  shrinkings  that  are  also 
wishes  of  a  negative  kind? 

Blocked  by  your  will  to  avoid  this  labor, 
I  sought  another  entrance;  but  it  was  too 


much  encumbered  by  prejudices  and  pre- 
conceived ideas,  and  all  the  litter  of  men- 
tal fragments  that  had  accumulated 
through  years  of  residence  in  a  creed- 
bound  place.  You  who  have  dwelt  but 
briefly  in  many  tents  have  no  obstructions 
at  your  door,  save  such  as  are  placed  by 
your  will,  and  those  I  now  sweep  away. 

I  shall  pass  in  and  out,  and  speak  to  you 
as  I  choose. 


54      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  II 

FEAB  NOT 

February  8,  1917. 

DID  I  not  tell  you  many  months  ago 
that  the  soul  of  Abraham  Lincoln 
kept  watch  above  this  land  that  he  died  to 
save  from  disruption,  and  that  he  would 
keep  vigil  until  America  should  have 
passed  through  her  next  great  trial  ?  You 
questioned  then  what  that  trial  would  be. 
Do  you  question  now?  And  yet  you  do 
not  know. 

Slowly  the  months  have  gone  by,  re- 
ceding into  the  past.  When,  in  the  spring 
of  1915,  you  saw  in  vision  the  German 
Emperor  in  spiked  helmet  standing  op- 
posite to  'Uncle  Sam  in  his  shirt-sleeves, 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  55 

did  you  not  suppose  that  it  would  come  to 
this  ?  You  are  wise  to  keep  such  visions  to 
yourself. 

Do  not  fancy  that  this  war  will  end 
without  greater  changes  than  the  world 
has  ever  known  before.  When  I  told  you 
nearly  two  years  ago  that  the  battle  be- 
tween the  powers  of  good  and  evil  had 
been  won  in  the  invisible  regions,  I  knew 
because  my  Teacher  told  me  so ;  but  do  not 
believe  that  the  new  age  can  dawn  with- 
out greater  trouble  and  greater  changes 
than  you  can  now  imagine.  Birth  is 
change  and  birth  is  painful,  and  birth  is 
bloody  and  exhausting.  The  pains  that 
have  gone  before  are  only  the  pains  of 
labor. 

The  stars  in  their  courses  fight  for  the 
new  race. 

I  have  written  of  the  bloody  fields  of 
Europe.  Now  I  would  write  of  America 


56      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  her  future,  her  near  and  her  far  fu- 
ture; for  the  sun  is  approaching  the  East- 
ern horizon  and  the  dawn  clouds  are  al- 
ready tinged  with  the  coming  day. 

America,  do  not  despair !  Your  destiny 
is  assured.  In  the  storms  to  come,  think 
of  the  freshness  after  the  storm,  when  the 
ground  shall  smell  sweet  and  birds  shall 
sing.  For  birds  will  sing  to  the  children 
of  the  new  age. 

In  the  midst  of  changes  there  will  come 
a  lull.  The  world  will  say,  "It  is  over, 
the  old  things  will  return,  and  all  will  be 
as  before."  But  nothing  will  ever  be  ex- 
actly as  it  was  before.  In  the  lull  you 
shall  draw  breath,  and  make  ready  for 
other  changes.  Yes,  many  things  will  be 
changed,  even  the  hearts  of  men. 

The  world  has  known  terror.  Without 
experience  of  terror,  without  the  poise  that 
comes  from  the  facing  of  terror  un- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  57 

daunted,  the  world  could  not  face  the  fu- 
ture without  failure.  Is  there  anything 
now,  after  thirty  months  of  war,  that  could 
surprise  the  world?  Is  there  anything 
that  the  world  could  not  face  ? 

Oh,  remember  that  you  are  immortal, 
and  that  you  who  go  out  of  life  will  come 
back  again,  strengthened  by  the  rest  in 
the  invisible!  For  a  change  of  place  is  a 
rest  of  consciousness.  To  those  whose 
nerves  are  weary,  wise  doctors  prescribe  a 
change.  A  rest  in  the  invisible  worlds  is 
more  refreshing  than  a  summer  in  the 
mountains.  Do  not  fear  death.  I  passed 
through  death,  and  I  am  more  rested  now 
than  a  strong  man  in  the  morning.  I  would 
not  go  back  to  my  old  body.  When  I  want 
a  body  again  I  shall  build  a  new  one.  I 
know  the  process  of  building,  having  built 
so  many  before. 

Be  joyous  with  me.    A  wise  man  once 


58      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

said  that  only  the  unendurable  is  tragic. 
The  world,  and  the  souls  of  the  world, 
can  endure  the  change  that  is  coming. 
Have  not  wars  prepared  them  for  it? 
That  is  why  wars  had  to  be. 

America  is  rich.  Her  vaults  are  full  of 
gold,  her  mines  are  full  of  ore,  and  her 
fresh  soil  is  full  of  richness.  Shall  she 
fear  a  future  in  which  labor  can  procure 
all  things  for  the  body,  and  faith  can  pro- 
cure all  things  for  the  soul?  The  "history 
of  this  land  is  a  history  of  faith.  Did  not 
Columbus  start  across  the  trackless  ocean, 
led  only  by  the  star  of  his  faith?  Did  not 
your  ancestors  follow,  led  by  their  faith  in 
the  future?  The  past  has  gone  back  to 
God,  it  is  safe  as  a  dead  man ;  but  the  fu- 
ture is  coming  to  you,  and  your  faith  shall 
make  it  sure. 

Fear  naught.  In  the  early  days  of  this 
land  your  forefathers  slept  in  quiet, 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  59 

though  the  red  man  lurked  in  the  forest, 
and  hunger  lurked  in  the  failure  of  har- 
vests, and  men  and  children  could  only  be 
winter-warm  when  trees  had  been  felled 
for  fuel.  Now  you  fear  famines  of  coal? 
The  earth  is  heavy  with  coal.  You  fear 
famines  of  wheat,  when  your  muscles  grow 
fat  for  lack  of  exercise.  They  who  came 
first  to  this  land  had  varied  reasons  for 
fear,  but  you  have  no  reasons  for  fear. 
Labor  is  sweet.  The  child  who  makes  la- 
bor of  play  can  vouch  for  the  truth  of  that 
saying.  Can  you  not  then  make  play  of 
your  labor?  When  I  was  a  child  I  built 
houses  of  blocks.  I  longed  to  be  building. 
I  dug  ditches  in  the  garden.  I  made  boats 
of  chips  and  sailed  them  on  a  puddle.  I 
planted  seeds. 

And  learning?  In  the  libraries  of  the 
world  and  in  the  brains  of  men  is  stored 
the  learning  of  the  ages.  The  new  age 


60      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

will  not  lack  the  archives  of  all  ages. 
Though  paper  is  less  enduring  than  parch- 
ment, it  will  last  over  into  the  new  age. 
Fear  not. 

By  hints  I  convey  to  your  mind  that 
many  changes  will  come.  What  then?  All 
progress  is  change.  Go  out  with  it  to 
meet  the  future,  with  a  smile  on  your  face 
and  a  song  on  your  lips.  The  future  wears 
a  rose  in  its  buttonhole,  as  your  Vagrom 
Angel  would  say. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  61 


LETTER  III 

THE  PROMISE  OF  SPRING 

February  17,  1917. 

WHEN  you  learn  to  think  of  life  as 
a  whole,  of  which  you  are  a  part 
containing  in  yourself  the  potentialities  of 
the  whole,  then  you  will  look  upon  these 
great  changes  with  joy.  The  One  must 
sometimes  sacrifice  itself  to  Itself,  and  by 
elimination  secure  a  new  lease  of  life.  The 
whole — call  it  the  race,  or  the  earth-spirit, 
or  what  you  will — may  grow  too  fat  and 
lazy,  as  a  man  may  grow  too  large  to  move 
about  with  ease,  and  then  by  war  among 
the  organs,  by  fever,  fasting  or  remedies, 
the  equilibrium  is  restored,  and  he  starts 
again  a  new  man,  ready  to  face  the  future. 


62      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

Grim,  does  it  seem?  But  who  told  you 
that  the  purposes  of  life  were  always  smil- 
ing? In  the  deeps  of  the  earth  and  in  the 
deeps  of  man  are  dark  substances. 

The  cold  of  winter  is  a  hardship  for 
those  who  expose  themselves  to  the  ele- 
ments; but  winter  is  the  ebb-tide  of  that 
changing  sea  of  life  whose  flood-tide  is  the 
summer.  Rhythm,  always  rhythm. 

I  would  not  have  you  discouraged  by 
the  winter  of  the  race,  for  the  spring  will 
come  and  the  roses  will  bloom  again. 
March  winds!  They  are  followed  by 
April  showers  and  Mayflowers.  We  are 
now  in  February. 

When  the  skies  are  dark  and  the  snows 
fall,  we  gather  round  the  fire  and  think 
of  the  future,  when  the  flowers  shall  bloom 
again  and  green  grass  shall  cover  the  earth 
and  birds  shall  sing  in  the  trees.  The  sun 
"crosses  the  line"  in  March  when  the  winds 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  63 

blow,  and  enters  the  sign  of  the  Ram,  and 
the  Zodiac  is  traversed  again  by  the  great 
light-giver  the  Sun.  Do  you  shiver  and 
grow  afraid  when  the  Equinox  ap- 
proaches? 

The  soul,  too,  has  its  winter  of  material- 
ism and  its  ideal  spring. 

I  have  looked  at  the  world  from  the  out- 
side, and  I  see  no  cause  for  despair.  I 
have  looked  at  the  soul  from  the  inside, 
and  I  see  great  cause  for  rejoicing. 

You  look  forward  to  the  end  of  the  war, 
but  the  soul  must  battle  to  the  end  of  its 
journey.  So  long  as  the  soul  is  cased  in 
matter  there  will  be  wars  enough,  for  the 
greatest  struggles  are  the  soul's  struggles 
with  itself.  I  have  told  you  this  before. 
Sometimes  it  goes  out  to  fight,  sometimes 
it  goes  in;  the  sword  will  not  rust  in  the 
scabbard. 

Think  less  of  yourself  and  think  more 


64      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

of  the  race.  You  lose  the  vision  of  the 
whole  by  regarding  too  closely  the  parts, 
by  regarding  too  closely  yourself  that  is 
only  one  of  the  parts.  Think  of  yourself 
as  the  race,  and  think  of  the  race  as  your- 
self; then  yourself  becomes  the  race,  and 
the  race  becomes  yourself;  "the  Universe 
grows  I." 

There  was  once  a  God  so  great  that  the 
cells  of  his  body  were  minor  gods.  You 
may  become  so  great  that  the  cells  of  your 
body  will  be  glad  to  sacrifice  themselves 
to  your  welfare.  By  renouncing  the  will 
to  live,  you  may  make  yourself  immortal. 
By  renouncing  the  will  to  joy,  you  may 
become  joyous. 

Once  I  desired  to  be  a  great  man.  Now 
when  I  only  desire  that  Man  shall  be 
great,  I  have  increased  in  stature  myself. 

Once  I  desired  to  be  loved;  but  now 
when  I  love  for  love's  sake  and  not  for 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  65 

my  own  sake,  I  am  loved  by  a  multitude. 
Surely  I  found  my  life  by  losing  it,  and 
the  words  of  the  Master  were  justified. 

I  look  down  at  the  world  as  I  once 
looked  down  at  my  garden.  I  see  that  the 
grass  is  sprouting  and  I  know  that  seeds 
are  in  the  ground.  I  have  planted  seeds 
in  the  hearts  of  men  that  shall  germinate 
and  reach  up  towards  the  sunshine,  for  I 
had  faith  in  the  spring. 

For  a  while  I  have  left  Europe  to  itself, 
and  have  come  back  to  the  land  I  love  best. 
I  have  journeyed  from  State  to  State, 
and  have  watched  the  wills  of  our  leg- 
islators. They  too  are  aware  that  a  Force 
is  at  work  through  them.  They  feel  the 
responsibility  of  their  place,  they  feel 
themselves  as  moving  parts  of  the  great 
whole  whose  name  is  America.  The  Flag 
is  the  symbol  of  their  consecration. 

I  have  walked  in  the  woods,  where  the 


66      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

spirits  of  the  land  fore-gather  for  counsels 
which  the  newspapers  do  not  report.  They 
too  are  aware  of  their  consecration.  They 
strengthen  you  with  their  faith.  When  I 
lived  as  a  man  in  America  I  did  not  know 
America.  To  know  the  meaning  of  home 
we  must  wander. 

I  am  all  for  unity  now.  Do  not  let  your- 
selves be  weakened  by  fear  of  the  parts. 
America  is  a  whole,  and  as  a  whole  she 
must  work.  To  fuse  these  many  races  to- 
gether is  the  mission  of  the  present  hour. 
Do  not  lend  your  hearts  to  division. 

I  see  a  great  leader  of  men  who  shall 
arise  in  this  land.  His  mission  will  be  the 
union  of  races.  He  will  be  a  teacher  and  a 
prophet. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  67 


LETTER  IV 

THE  DIET  OF  GOLD 

March  10, 1917. 

THE  very  influences  that  now  tend 
to  disrupt  this  country  will  later 
draw  it  together.  The  many  will  find 
their  meeting-point  in  the  One.  That  idea 
of  national  unity  must  be  fostered,  even  to 
the  extent  of  patient  tolerance  of  racial 
temperaments.  Those  who  are  in  the 
process  of  being  separated  from  their  old 
race  and  amalgamated  with  the  new  race, 
feel  the  strain  of  the  change.  It  irritates 
them  and  their  blood  protests,  even  when 
their  wills  bid  them  forge  new  bonds  for 
themselves.  Few  "hyphenated  Ameri- 


cans"  would  be  willing  to  go  bodily  back 
to  their  old  allegiance. 

America  is  the  most  interesting  of  all 
countries,  and  we  who  see  it  from  this  side 
of  the  airy  frontier  see  it  in  historical  per- 
spective. The  view  that  is  nearest  to  our 
point  of  view  is  that  of  your  present  Chief 
Executive.  His  eyes  are  far-seeing.  He 
anticipates  the  clearer  sight  that  will  one 
day  be  his,  when  he  has  finished  his  work. 

Our  country  is  suffering  at  this  mo- 
ment, in  March,  of  the  year  of  our  Lord 
nineteen  hundred  and  seventeen,  from  an 
indigestion  of  gold.  You  have  swallowed 
more  gold  than  you  can  assimilate,  and 
your  organs  are  congested.  If  to  restore 
the  equilibrium,  some  of  this  gold  should 
be  regurgitated,  by  war  or  by  other  means, 
do  not  in  the  weariness  that  follows  fancy 
that  the  nation  is  going  to  die. 

Do  not  be  shocked  by  my  figures  of 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  69 

speech.  I  want  to  get  into  your  conscious- 
ness an  understanding  of  facts  and  con- 
ditions as  they  exist. 

You  cannot  feed  on  gold.  "Gold  is  a; 
medium  of  exchange."  When  it  is  merely 
hoarded  it  has  lost  its  relation  to  life.  A 
miser  nation  is  a  sadder  subject  for  con- 
templation than  a  miser  man,  with  his  long 
claws  and  his  gloating  eyes.  He  may 
think,  the  miser  man,  to  secure  himself 
from  the  dangers  of  the  future  by  amass- 
ing gold  for  its  own  sake.  A  miser  nation 
may  think  that  by  amassing  gold  for  its 
own  sake  it  can  save  itself  from  the  finan- 
cial dangers  threatening  the  world  after 
these  years  of  war. 

But  the  miser,  known  as  such,  is  in  dan- 
ger of  being  robbed  and  murdered.  And 
the  miser  nation  is  in  danger  of  being  at- 
tacked and  looted  by  other  nations. 

You  Americans  want  to  be  generous  to 


the  homeless  and  foodless  people  of  Eu- 
rope ;  but  your  generosity  has  not  yet  de- 
prived of  one  square  meal  the  hundred- 
million-headed  being  that  is  America. 

I  do  not  care  so  much  what  you  do  with 
your  gold.  But  I  care  much  what  you  do 
with  your  food.  You  are  not  alchemists 
that  you  can  make  gold  potable.  You  are 
humans  with  delicate  stomachs.  Even  a 
hen  will  not  lay  eggs  for  you  unless  she  is 
well  fed.  If  she  protests,  you  can  pun- 
ish her  by  eating  her;  but  the  luckiest 
break  of  her  wish-bone  will  not  produce 
for  you  another  hen.  Better  conserve  her 
labor  power  by  gifts  of  grain,  and  have 
your  eggs  for  breakfast  and  for  hatching. 
(She  has  periods  of  laziness  when  she  wants 
to  sit  still ;  but  put  a  few  of  her  own  eggs 
under  her,  and  watch  for  results.  Later  I 
shall  tell  you  of  other  but  no  less  practical 
ways  of  ensuring  a  supply  of  breakfasts. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  71 


LETTER  V 

CONTINGENT  FEES 

March  10,1917. 

TO-DAY  I  heard  that  a  certain  rich 
man  (unmindful  of  the  camel  and 
the  needle's  eye),  supposing  that  the  let- 
ters from  this  Living  Dead  Man  had  been 
profitable  to  you,  that  there  was  "money 
in  them,"  was  considering  the  question  of 
whether  he  should  financially  back  a  me- 
dium who  stood  ready  to  declare  that  she 
was  in  communication  with  me,  that  I  re- 
pudiated the  books  written  through  you, 
and  stood  sponsor  for  certain  manu- 
scripts written  "through"  her,  as  my  only 
genuine  messenger  to  the  world. 


I  join  in  your  laughter,  at  your  sup- 
posed "profitable"  investment  in  the  se- 
curities of  the  other  world,  and  at  the 
eagerness  to  get  aboard  a  sea-of-ether- 
worthy  ship  exhibited  by  people  who  have 
not  paid  their  fare. 

I  may  as  well  tell  you  now  that  this 
country  and  some  others  are  scattered  over 
with  supposed  "communications"  from 
me.  It  would  seem  that  my  writing  arms 
are  as  numerous  as  the  feet  of  a  centipede. 
It  would  also  seem  by  the  style  of  some  of 
these  supposed  communications,  by  their 
contents  and  their  contradictions,  that  I 
have  as  many  minds  as  Indra  has  eyes. 

Even  the  elementals  of  the  ouija  board 
do  not  contradict  themselves  so  frequently 
as  these  amanuenses  make  me  contradict 
myself.  I  think  you  will  have  to  trade- 
mark me. 


After  the  serious  nature  of  my  recent 
letters,  it  relaxes  me  to  jest. 

If  you  include  this  letter  in  the  book, 
please  head  it  "Contingent  Fees." 


74   LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  VI 

THE  THREE  APPEALS 

March  11,  1917. 

I  STAND  outside  the  world  and  look 
inside  the  hearts  of  men.  I  see  more 
than  I  saw  when  I  was  a  man  among  them. 
Had  I  then  looked  as  deep  into  my  own 
heart  as  I  now  look  into  theirs,  I  should 
have  seen  the  hearts  of  my  fellow  beings 
reflected  in  my  own,  for  we  differ  from 
one  another  as  one  insect  differs  from  an- 
other. There  are  diff erences  between  in- 
sects. 

I  look  into  your  hearts,  O  men !  and  this 
is  what  I  see:  Ideals  and  hypocrisy,  self- 
interest  and  altruism,  hunger  and  satiety. 

Shall  I,  in  offering  advice,  appeal  to 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  75 

your  ideals,  your  self-interest,  or  your 
hunger?  The  opposite  three  would  never 
spur  you  to  action  along  the  lines  I  would 
have  you  spurred. 


76   LAST  LETTERS  FROM 
LETTER  VII 

THE  BUILDERS 

March  22,  1917. 

I  HAVE  promised  to  offer  you  advice 
as  to  how  you  may  restore  your  equi- 
librium. Use  much  of  this  superfluity  of 
gold  in  rebuilding  devastated  Europe. 
Give  her  credits  and  give  her  food.  You 
who  can  work  in  the  fields,  raise  food  to 
feed  Europe.  You  who  can  build,  give 
the  labor  of  your  hands  wherever  it  is 
needed.  You  who  are  discontented  here, 
go  back  to  that  Europe  which  gave  you 
birth.  By  so  doing  you  will  give  your- 
selves a  new  point  of  view,  and  you  will 
give  yourselves  a  new  interest.  A  new 
interest  is  a  new  lease  of  life. 

Make  sacrifices.    In  saying  that,  I  have 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  77 

two  objects  in  view,  the  effect  on  the  world 
and  the  effect  on  yourselves. 

To  work  for  the  ideal  is  sometimes  more 
practical  than  to  work  for  what  is  called 
the  real. 

When  I  tell  you  to  rebuild  Europe,  you 
can  take  it  as  ideal  advice  or  practical  ad- 
vice, "depending  on  your  point  of  view.  It 
is  ideal  because  Europe  needs  rebuilding; 
it  is  practical  because  just  now  and  for  a 
time  to  come  America  needs  to  get  her 
mind  on  something  outside  herself.  We 
give  that  advice  to  individual  when  they 
are  too  self-centred.  There  is  so  much  dis- 
content and  so  much  uncertainty  that  any- 
thing which  can  catch  and  hold  the  atten- 
tion of  masses  of  men,  which  can  make 
them  forget  themselves,  may  enable  them 
to  be  used  by  the  Genius  of  the  rac°,  which 
works  for  the  welfare  of  the  race  as  a 
whole. 


78      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

Lend  your  money  to  Europe,  and  do 
not  ask  usurious  interest.  Yes,  you  can 
take  interest,  for  money  has  earning  pow- 
er, and  the  laborer — even  the  laborer  Gold 
— is  worthy  of  his  hire.  But  help  by 
your  generous  lendings  at  low  interest  to 
lessen  the  awful  burden  of  taxation  for 
the  people  of  Europe,  which  makes  also 
for  discontent  and  discouragement. 

Go  to  Europe,  many  of  you,  that  you 
may  see  what  war  does  to  a  country,  what 
it  might  do  to  your  country  should  you 
selfishly  expose  yourselves  to  a  desire  on 
the  part  of  outsiders  to  take  from  you  by 
force  that  which  you  have  so  skilfully  ac- 
quired. 

Go,  that  you  may  see  and  feel,  as  you 
can  only  see  and  feel  face  to  face,  the 
spirit  of  self-sacrifice  and  national  devo- 
tion which  has  animated  the  people  of  Eu- 
rope in  this  long  war.  They  have  found 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN    79 

their  souls,  but  you  have  not  yet  found 
your  soul. 

There  are  engineers  in  this  country  who 
are  less  needed  here  than  they  will  be  need- 
ed in  Europe.  There  are  specialists  in 
all  the  branches  of  science  who  are  more 
needed  there  than  here.  We  have  special- 
ists enough.  We  can  spare  a  few  of  them. 

Build  ships.  Build  more  ships.  Keep 
the  men  occupied.  Give  them  an  objec- 
tive. Do  not  let  them  brood.  An  idle 
brain  is  the  devil's  workshop.  If  you  have 
not  work  enough,  make  work.  There  are 
things  enough  to  be  done.  Build  ships. 

Now  in  regard  to  your  management  of 
railroads  and  other  public  utilities.  The 
day  for  government  control  was  heralded 
when  the  threat  of  a  strike  came  that 
would  have,  if  put  into  effect,  blocked  the 
wheels  of  the  nation.  All  those  public 
utilities  whose  blocked  wheels  could 


80      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

threaten  the  national  life  and  the  move- 
ments of  men  should  be  managed  by  the 
government.  This  is  not  socialism,  or  any 
other  ism.  You  who  have  stoak  in  them, 
do  not  take  alarm.  A  way  can  be  found 
that  will  satisfy  you. 

Think  of  the  good  of  the  whole,  for  you 
who  are  a  part  cannot  prosper  without  the 
welfare  of  the  whole.  This  is  not  cant.  It 
is  a  sort  of  race  biology.  I  look  down  and 
see  you  as  a  great  being,  and  I  prescribe 
for  you  as  a  being,  a  race-unity,  not  as  a 
few  individuals  here  and  there.  The  cells 
in  the  body  of  the  race-being  must  all  be 
working  together.  Get  a  unit  of  con- 
sciousness, as  a  race.  Yield  yourselves  to 
the  consciousness  of  the  race-unit.  Be  as 
individual  as  you  please,  but  be  individual 
parts.  Get  into  balance  with  other  indi- 
viduals, positive  and  negative. 

Make  the  rebuilding  of  Europe  an  ob- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  81 

jective  point.  Make  it  possible  for  many 
discontented  workers  to  go  to  work  in  Eu- 
rope. You  may  say  that  the  armies  of 
Europe,  when  released  from  military 
service,  will  furnish  workers  enough;  but 
there  cannot  be  too  many.  There  is  a 
double  object  in  this:  the  object  of  getting 
work  done,  and  that  of  the  psychological 
effect  upon  the  worker. 

I  wish  I  could  get  into  your  minds  by 
infusion  the  state  of  consciousness  that  is 
mine.  I  wish  I  could  make  you  see  that 
separation  is  death  and  that  unity  is  life. 

I  have  spoken  of  government  control  of 
railroads,  but  that  is  only  the  beginning. 
There  should  be  governmental  handling 
of  food.  Begin  gradually,  one  thing  after 
another.  It  is  the  destiny  of  the  world  to 
go  in  that  direction.  You  cannot  block 
the  wheels  of  that  chariot. 

Serve  if  you  hope  to  survive  would  be 


82      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

a  good  motto.  You  cannot  survive  if  you 
do  not  serve — all  of  you.  I  like  that  fig- 
ure of  the  cell  which  is  a  part  of  the  race- 
being.  It  is  the  way  I  see  you. 

Just  a  word  about  nervous  diseases. 
Yes,  it  is  related  to  what  I  have  been  say- 
ing. When  at  last  the  let-up  comes  after 
the  unnatural  strain  of  war,  the  minds  of 
men  in  going  back,  or  in  attempting  to  go 
back  to  their  normal  state,  may  find  them- 
selves unable  immediately  to  adjust  to 
the  changed  conditions.  For  a  long  time 
the  brains  of  men  and  women  have  been 
stimulated  by  the  coffee  of  concerted  ac- 
tion ;  when  they  are  thrown  back  on  them- 
selves they  may  relax  too  much. 

Or,  on  the  other  hand,  an  unnatural  ex- 
citement may  drive  them  into  all  kinds  of 
excesses.  Have  you  ever  seen  victims  of 
mania  who  could  not  rest,  who  had  lost  the 


ability  to  rest?  They  walk  up  and  down, 
and  drum  with  their  feet,  and  clench  their 
hands.  So  many  men  and  women  may  be, 
after  this  war.  There  is  certain  to  be  an 
excess  of  love  excitement,  and  work  is  a 
good  panacea  for  that  complaint. 

Then  again,  after  years  of  war,  years  in 
which  many  have  not  known  in  the  morn- 
ing whether  they  would  be  alive  at  night, 
they  may  retain  the  habit  of  dread.  They 
may  fear  to  rest  and  fear  to  relax.  Thus 
they  may  welcome  any  excitement,  as  a 
substitute  for  the  stimulus  to  which  they 
have  been  accustomed. 

That  is  another  reason  why  I  would 
send  Americans  to  labor  with  the  laborers 
of  Europe.  Not  that  the  American  work- 
ing man  is  phlegmatic,  far  from  it;  but 
with  his  mind  unaccustomed  to  fear  any- 
thing, except  the  loss  of  his  job  and  conse- 
quent hunger,  he  will  have  an  effect  of 


84      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

confidence  and  hope  on  those  around  him. 
The  American  likes  to  feel  that  he  is  lead- 
ing, and  in  what  better  way  can  he  indulge 
that  propensity  than  in  leading  his  asso- 
ciates to  hope? 

You  have  no  idea — you  cannot  have  an 
idea — of  the  great  depression  that  will  fol- 
low this  war  for  a  short  while.  It  will  be 
the  relaxation,  the  letting  go.  Always  aft- 
er war  the  ebb-tide  is  followed  by  great 
activity;  but  it  is  that  ebb-tide  which  we 
have  to  consider. 

You  in  America  will  feel  it.  You  have 
become  accustomed  to  seeing  gold  flow  to- 
wards these  shores.  When  the  stream  les- 
sens, you  will  have  to  combat  the  tendency 
to  fear  that  lessening,  Panics  are  like 
personal  fear,  intensified  by  mass. 

The  world  is  drawing  close  together, 
and  what  influences  a  part  influences  the 
whole. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  85 

After  the  war  will  also  come  an  opening 
of  the  psychic  senses  of  men,  everywhere. 
This,  while  good  in  itself,  may  become  an 
added  danger.  Prophets,  true  and  false, 
will  arise  everywhere,  with  many  remedies 
for  the  diseases  of  souls  and  of  bodies. 

If  I  may  make  another  suggestion,  it 
would  be  that  those  who  have  psychic 
awakening  should  think  twice  before  pro- 
claiming the  fact.  It  is  a  new  sense  that 
is  coming  into  manifestation;  but  as  the 
opening  of  the  eyes  in  an  early  stage  of 
evolution  probably  revealed  as  many  dan- 
gers as  blessings,  so  the  new  sense  will  re- 
veal dangers.  Do  not  try  to  close  the  new 
sense,  but  do  not  be  carried  away  by  it. 
Remember  that  it  will  be  practically  gen- 
eral, and  like  every  new  sense  it  will  be  de- 
fective for  a  long  time.  It  will  reveal 
false  things  as  well  as  true.  If  a  man 
opened  his  eyes  for  the  first  time  upon  a 


86      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

harmless  tree,  he  might  mistake  it  for  a 
monster. 

Restraint  in  all  things,  moderation  in 
all  things,  even  in  the  laudable  desire  to 
action.  Weigh  and  measure.  Prove  he- 
fore  accepting  anything — prove  by  reason 
and  by  intuition  if  you  cannot  wait  for 
proof  by  practice.  Weigh  and  measure 
what  I  say,  as  well  as  what  the  wildest 
new  prognosticate  says.  Discourage 
hysteria.  A  wave  of  hysteria  is  likely  to 
sweep  over  the  world. 

As  revolution  follows  revolution,  the 
startled  inhabitants  of  the  world  may  tell 
themselves  that  nothing  in  the  universe  is 
stable,  that  all  is  going  to  destruction, 
and  that  as  they  cannot  save  themselves 
from  what  seems  to  be  universal  chaos, 
they  may  as  well  get  all  the  pleasurable 
excitement  possible  out  of  the  passing  mo- 
ment. Restraint,  restraint! 


I  see  women  afraid  to  bear  children  be- 
cause of  the  uncertainty  of  the  morrow. 
I  see  men  afraid  to  marry  because  of  the 
uncertainty  of  domesticity.  I  see  farmers 
hesitate  to  plant  because  of  the  uncer- 
tainty of  the  harvest.  Again  I  say,  be  not 
afraid. 

If  you  sow,  you  shall  reap.  If  you 
marry,  you  shall  build  a  home.  If  you 
have  children,  the  race  will  protect  them — 
and  you  are  a  part  of  the  race. 

Restraint!    Fearlessness! 


88   LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  VIII 

THE  WORLD  OF  MIND 

March  24, 19 17. 

I  WISH  that  more  people  of  sane, 
sound  mind  would  experiment  in  tel- 
epathic communication.  I  know  there  is 
any  amount  of  uncoordinated  and  half- 
serious  playing  with  phenomena ;  but  with 
scientific  accuracy  of  observation  and 
scientific  precision  in  recording  data,  not 
only  the  body  of  sensible  literature  on 
these  subjects  would  be  increased,  but  the 
habits  of  careful  observation  and  preci- 
sion in  reporting  supernormal  facts  would 
be  developed  in  the  experimentalists. 

You  who  write  for  me,  continue  to  make 
and  to  record  experiments.    You  are  al- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  89 

most  too  cautious,  but  most  persons  are 
not  cautious  enough. 

Explain  the  necessary  conditions  of 
passivity  and  activity  between  those  work- 
ing together.  Though  the  best  results  are 
often  obtained  by  you  alone,  yet  the  testi- 
mony of  one  person  is  not  so  convincing 
as  the  testimony  of  several  who  have  wit- 
nessed and  taken  part  in  the  same  phe- 
nomena. But  you  are  right  in  hesitating 
to  take  on  the  psychic  conditions  of  insin- 
cere and  merely  curious  people  who  would 
like  to  work  with  you. 

The  great  difficulty  with  most  persons 
is  that  they  cannot  make  themselves  suf- 
ficiently negative  for  the  time  being. 
When  the  experiments  are  over  they  can 
and  should  become  equally  positive.  They 
can  shift  from  one  pole  to  the  other,  and 
they  must  do  so  if  they  wish  to  preserve 
their  physical  health  and  balance, 


90      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

But  bear  in  mind  that  the  influences 
from  this  side  are  good  and  bad,  even  as 
the  influences  in  the  world  are ;  and  if  you 
feel  that  any  "presence"  is  hostile,  at  once 
banish  it  and  become  positive.  After  any 
approach  by  an  undesirable  influence,  you 
should  not  for  some  hours  let  yourself  be- 
come negative.  Go  for  a  walk,  or  attack 
some  difficult  piece  of  work,  or  read  a  book 
that  demands  mental  activity  in  order  to 
grasp  its  meaning. 

You  live  in  a  sea  of  mind,  as  well  as  in 
a  psychic  sea;  they  interpenetrate,  and 
they  interpenetrate  with  the  physical;  but 
in  working  through  and  with  them,  keep 
them  as  distinct  as  possible. 

I  work  more  and  more  in  the  mental 
world,  and  less  and  less  in  the  astral ;  but 
the  majority  of  my  readers  will  not  know 
exactly  what  I  mean  by  that  statement. 
There  is  a  greater  difference  between  the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  91 

astral  and  the  mental  than  there  is  be- 
tween the  astral  and  the  physical. 

Do  not  despise  the  astral.  Its  dynamics 
are  of  colossal  import.  But  cultivate  more 
and  more  the  purely  mental,  because  the 
astral  in  all  of  you  is  developed  beyond 
the  mental. 

In  my  former  writings  I  have  told  you 
something  of  the  dangers  of  the  astral. 
Now  I  want  to  tell  you  some  of  the  more 
obvious  dangers  of  the  mental. 

Those  who  learn  that  they  can  create 
in  mind  need  to  develop  a  sense  of  respon- 
sibility. They  are  too  reckless  in  demon- 
strating their  power.  Remember  that  as 
you  go  up  in  the  planes  of  being  you 
get  into  subtler  and  subtler  regions,  and 
strength  increases  with  the  degree  of  sub- 
tlety— not  the  reverse,  as  you  would  nat- 
urally suppose. 

One  of  the  greatest  temptations  of  the 


92      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

mental  world  is  that  of  the  creation  of 
falsehoods.  By  stating  that  which  is  not 
true,  you  project  into  the  realm  of  mind  a 
pictiare  that  has  a  certain  permanency.  It 
may  deceive  others,  but  in  time  it  will  de- 
ceive you,  its  creator.  Those  who  speak 
falsely  cannot  perceive  truth.  Those  who 
create  false  pictures  in  the  mental  world 
will  be  deceived  by  those  very  pictures; 
they  will  reap  the  eif  ects  of  the  causes 
they  have  set  up. 

Have  you  not  known  people  who  were 
always  being  deceived  by  their  "friends"? 
They  are  generally  those  who  have  left  de- 
ceiving pictures  behind  themselves.  There 
are  people  who  cannot  discriminate  be- 
tween the  false  and  the  true.  They  de- 
ceive and  are  deceived.  Those  who  de- 
ceive are  always  deceived,  whatever  their 
supposed  intellect  may  be. 

And  I  would  say  to  those  to  whom  I 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  93 

now  suggest  experiments  with  clairvoy- 
ance and  telepathy,  that  if  they  have 
planted  the  seeds  of  falsehood  they  will 
reap  a  harvest  of  deceptive  appearances. 
Test  yourselves  in  that  way,  you  who  be- 
lieve yourselves  to  be  sincere.  You  may 
learn  something  of  value  regarding  your 
own  karma.  (Yes,  I  will  use  Theosophic 
or  Indian  terms  when  they  express  my 
meaning.  Those  who  re-write  the  Orien- 
tal philosophies  in  western  terms  can  pass 
for  original  only  with  the  ignorant.) 

What  the  new  race  needs  most  of  all  is 
truth.  Modern  science  is  preparing  the 
world  for  the  fearless  facing  of  truth.  The 
man  who  toils  over  a  microscope  that  he 
may  observe  and  record  some  fact  in  na- 
ture, is  more  the  servant  of  God  than  the 
man  who  with  sanctimonious  face  tells  his 
fellow  creatures  what  they  must  not  do; 


94      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

for  his  work  at  least  is  positive  in  its  re- 
sults. 

There  are  too  many  "thou  shalt  nots"; 
too  few  "I  shalls." 

The  new  race  will  develop  a  wide  tol- 
erance. It  will  discourage  undesirable 
things  more  by  ignoring  them  than  by  at- 
tacking them.  By  attacking  a  thing  we 
give  it  power. 

Work  more  and  more  in  the  world  of 
mind.  The  results  in  the  physical  will  be 
immense. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  95 


LETTER  IX 

AMERICA'S  GOOD  FRIDAY 

April  6,  1917. 

IT  is  past  midnight.  It  is  Good  Fri- 
day. Momentous  decisions  for  the 
world  and  for  all  time  are  heavy  in  the 
souls  of  men. 

On  the  day  that  this  day  stands  for,  in 
the  long  ago,  a  man  (who  was  also  a  god) 
stood  forth  alone  for  the  ideas  of  love  and 
human  brotherhood.  At  last,  after  all 
these  years,  the  thing  for  which  he  died 
may  be  realized.  But  there  was  a  cruci- 
fixion on  that  Friday,  centuries  ago. 

I  have  brought  you  from  a  far-away 
shore  that  you  might  witness  a  great  strug- 


96      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

gle  in  the  souls  of  men.  You  have  arrived 
at  a  centre.* 

To-day,  in  thousands  of  churches 
throughout  Christendom,  prayers  will  be 
offered  to  the  god-man  who  died  that  the 
god  in  man  might  live.  To-day  in  millions 
of  hearts  the  cross  will  be  set  up. 

It  is  so  still  here  at  midnight,  at  a  few 
minutes  past  midnight  on  this  day  of  days. 

Christianity  has  arisen,  and  presses  for- 
ward to  Golgotha  to  witness  an  event. 

Pray!  Prayer  is  the  affirmation  by  the 
soul  of  its  unity  with  the  One.  War  is  the 
affirmation  of  the  soul  of  its  separateness 
from  many. 

Love  your  enemies.  It  is  the  only  way 
that  you  can  conquer  them. 

*  I  had  arrived  in  New  York  a  few  hours  before 
after  a  long  sojourn  in  California. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  97 


LETTER  X 

THE  CRUCIBLE 

April  12,  1917. 

LET  us  speak  a  little  of  this  initiation 
through  which  the  race  is  passing. 
Always  the  trials  precede  the  attainment. 

When  these  wars  are  over  there  will  be 
a  new  world,  for  the  souls  of  men  will  have 
been  baptized  with  the  fire  and  the  blood. 
America  must  have  her  part  in  it.  To  her 
also  must  come  the  trials  and  the  attain- 
ment. Watch  and  pray. 

Some  day  I  will  send  you  back  to  com- 
mune with  the  soul  of  the  Old  World — 
some  day  we  will  send  you  back.  It  is  an- 
other Europe  you  will  find,  a  Europe  tried 
by  fire,  and  some  of  it  will  be  fine  steel, 


98      LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  some  of  it  will  be  clinkers  in  the  fur- 
nace, for  the  fire  proves  the  metal,  and 
separates  the  metal  from  the  slag. 

From  before  the  war  to  this  day,  the 
battles  of  the  earth  have  been  enacted  also 
in  your  soul,  the  blood  and  the  fire,  the 
pain  and  the  travail.  You  too  have  passed 
through  the  fiery  furnace. 

Long  ago,  when  you  identified  your 
soul  with  the  soul  of  the  world,  you  took 
upon  yourself  the  trials  of  the  world,  the 
initiatory  trials.  You  also  called  down 
upon  yourself  the  weight  of  your  old 
karma,  the  effects  of  the  causes  you  had 
set  up  through  the  ages.  That  you  are  at 
rest  for  a  time  means  only  that  you  have 
worked  yourself  free  from  a  little  of  the 
load.  Had  you  not  done  it  now,,  you 
would  have  had  to  do  it  in  the  future.  Re- 
joice for  every  trial  that  brings  you  nearer 
to  the  goal.  And  this  I  say  for  all  men. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  99 

If  I  speak  of  the  world  now,  instead  of 
that  part  only  that  we  call  America,  it  is 
to  identify  the  part  with  the  whole.  If  I 
speak  of  you  personally,  it  is  to  identify 
you  with  the  whole. 

Back  in  that  Europe  to  which  you  will 
go,  you  will  find  two  classes,  those  who 
have  become  fine  steel,  and  those  who  have 
become  refuse.  You  will  know  the  one 
from  the  other. 

They  will  welcome  you  back,  for  you 
have  passed  through  the  fire  with  them. 
They  will  welcome  your  country,  too,  for 
it  now  turns  its  face  to  the  fire. 

Be  not  discouraged  by  dismal  prophe- 
cies. Man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone. 
If  you  have  less  to  eat,  your  bodies  will 
grow  finer.  If  you  have  more  to  do,  your 
minds  and  spirits  will  expand.  Few  of 
you  work  to  your  full  capacity.  The  unit 
of  force  that  is  man  may  generate  much 


100    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

energy,  drawing  it  up  from  the  deeps  of 
himself  at  the  call  of  need  or  of  will. 

Work  harder  now.  Once  I  told  you  to 
rest  more,  but  the  laborers  are  called  to 
the  vineyard.  The  hour  of  rest  will  come 
again,  when  the  day  draws  near  its  close. 

In  entering  into  the  war,  my  country, 
put  away  all  rancor,  and  fight  for  the  right 
in  which  there  is  no  rancor.  Hate  not. 
The  hour  for  hate  is  past.  (I  say  this, 
knowing  that  Hate  and  Fear,  the  mother 
of  Hate,  will  come  and  challenge  your 
souls.) 

I  do  not  hate,  and  I  do  not  fear,  and  I 
shall  stay  with  you  until  the  day  draws  to 
its  close.  Are  you  sorry  now  that  you  let 
me  speak  again?  When  fear  comes  to  your 
house,  I  will  speak  to  you  of  courage. 
When  hate  shall  menace  you,  I  will  turn 
it  into  love.  I  have  found  the  Philoso- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  101 

pher's  Stone  that  can  transmute  base 
metals  into  gold. 

Hate  will  be  turned  to  love  in  this  land 
where  the  Eagle  cries.  Listen  to  the  cry 
of  the  Eagle.  It  is  a  free  bird,  and  it  flies 
high.  Its  message  has  only  been  hinted 
at,  in  the  years  that  have  yet  been  num- 
bered. The  Eagle  will  teach  freedom. 
They  will  listen — across  the  sea. 

America  is  indeed  the  melting-pot  of 
nations.  I  can  find  no  better  figure  of 
speech.  The  German-American  who  is 
loyal  to  America  now,  who  hides  the  trag- 
edy in  his  heart  behind  a  brave  face,  may 
also  come  through  the  furnace  fine  steel. 

I  am  glad  you  know  that  they  suffer. 
Hold  the  loyal  ones  in  your  heart,  with 
all  other  loyal  Americans.  So  you  will 
help  in  the  process  of  melting.  To  some 
of  them  the  tragedy  will  open  the  doors 
of  initiation.  Their  loyalty  to  a  pledge  is 


102    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

a  finer  trial  than  the  fire  of  a  battlefield. 
Those  who  are  loyal  must  not  be  made 
pariahs.  Of  those  who  are  disloyal  I  say 
nothing,  but  leave  them  to  the  Law. 

The  initiatory  process!  It  has  the 
earth  in  its  grasp.  There  are  those  whom 
you  love  that  it  has  in  its  grasp,  too.  They 
suffer,  as  you  have  suffered.  But  they 
shall  find  peace. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN>  103 


LETTER  XI 

MAKE  CLEAN  YOUR  HOUSE 

May  4,  1917. 

DO  you  loiow  that  the  human  race  is 
being  weighed  in  the  balances? 
Work  and  pray  that  it  may  not  be  found 
wanting. 

We  who  dwell  in  the  clear  light  of  that 
world  which  is  to  you  the  Other  World, 
can  see  the  handwriting  on  the  wall. 

The  world  has  been  too  dishonest.  In 
an  honest  world,  could  this  war  have  been? 
In  the  world  that  is  to  come,  nation  will 
not  distrust  nation,  nor  man  distrust  man. 
But  now  distrust  is  a  necessary  part  of 
the  human  equipment.  You  may  trust — 
but  not  too  far,  You  may  love  your 


104    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

neighbor — but  not  too  much.  You  may 
do  to  your  brother  as  you  would  have  him 
do  to  you — but  not  all  the  time. 

America  was  builded  on  a  foundation 
of  ideals ;  but  there  is  too  much  of  the  mud 
of  personal  seeking  mixed  with  the  good 
clay  of  your  bricks. 

You  washed  away  with  your  blood  one 
plague-spot,  that  of  slavery;  but  there  is 
another  plague-spot  you  have  got  to  wash 
away.  Will  you  do  it  with  the  free  water 
of  good  will,  or  will  you  do  it  again  with 
your  blood?  I  wait  to  see. 

Do  not  say  that  the  world's  troubles  are 
over,  because  America  has  come  into  the 
war.  The  world's  troubles  are  not  over. 
When  the  war  is  over — the  greater  war — 
make  clean  your  house,  O  America! 

There  is  no  other  civilized  country 
where  the  premiums  upon  dishonesty  are 
so  high. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  105 

Can  you  buy  a  pound  of  butter  and  be 
certain  that  you  get  sixteen  full  ounces? 
Can  you  buy  a  pound  of  meat  and  be  sure 
that  the  scales  are  true? 

A  new  race  is  being  born.  Begin  with 
those  children,  and  teach  them  honesty  be- 
fore you  teach  them  geography — honesty 
with  the  parents,  honesty  with  each  other, 
honesty  with  themselves.  "As  the  twig 
is  bent  the  tree  inclines." 

When  I  was  a  little  boy  I  was  taught 
that  George  Washington  could  not  tell  a 
lie.  I  had  an  ideal  of  George  Washing- 
ton. I  wanted  to  emulate  him.  And  so 
when  I  was  a  man  I  sought  truth.  I 
looked  for  it  on  the  surface  of  the  ground, 
and  also  in  deep  wells.  Once  I  spent 
years  in  the  wilderness  trying  to  find  truth 
in  myself.  I  remained  in  the  wilderness 
until  I  found  it.  Had  I  not  found  it,  I 
should  have  left  my  bones  there, 


10«    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

You  need  a  new  set  of  copy-book 
maxims.  If  the  boy  who  writes  "Honesty 
is  the  best  policy"  at  school  in  the  morn- 
ing, sees  in  the  afternoon  his  father  trying 
to  trade  a  balky  horse  for  a  good  roadster, 
he  wonders  if  his  teacher  is  fooling  him. 
The  disillusionment  of  children  is  tragic 
with  menace  for  the  coming  State.  I 
would  rather  see  reproach  in  the  eyes  of 
an  Adept  Teacher  than  in  the  eyes  of  a 
child.  If  I  fail  my  Teacher  I  do  not  hurt 
him  seriously,  if  I  fail  my  child  I  hurt  him 
irreparably. 

You  must  face  the  fact  that  the  life  of 
America  is  going  to  be  reorganized. 

You  have  wondered  why  I  have  not 
written  of  late.  I  have  been  busy,  study- 
ing America.  I  have  seen  much  that  I  can 
tell  you,  and  much  that  I  cannot  tell  you 
•*— yet.  For  I  want  you  to  be  quief .  You 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN.  107 

could  not  be  quiet  if  you  knew  as  much  as 
I  know. 

It  has  been  said  that  necessity  knows 
no  law.  Forget  it  not,  you  war-profiteers 
who  would  corner  the  world's  necessities. 
Remember  that  a  cornered  animal  is  dan- 
gerous, and  a  cornered  necessity  has  hoofs 
and  horns. 

There  is  a  disease  that  has  no  name 
among  the  doctors — the  disease  of  colos- 
sal possessions.  Its  symptoms  are  a  vora- 
cious appetite  for  more  possessions,  and  a 
phobia  lest  possessions  should  be  lost.  It 
is  worse  than  neuralgia  and  indigestion 
combined  to  disturb  the  rest  of  the  victim. 

I  long  to  see  a  hundred  million  and 
more  people  living  in  peace  and  plenty  in 
America. 

Fanatics  prattle  about  the  confiscation 
of  great  fortunes.  I  do  not  care  so  much 
what  you  do  with  your  fortunes.  But  I 


108    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

care  much  what  you  do  with  your  land 
and  your  food,  and  I  care  more  what  you 
do  with  your  men  and  women  and  little 
children. 

Do  not  get  into  a  panic,  I  pray  you. 
A  panic  is  worse  than  a  quicksand  to  get 
into.  Keep  calm.  The  country  is  in  no 
danger,  if  it  does  not  lose  its  head. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  109 


LETTER  XII 

LEVEL  HEADS 

May  15, 1917. 

DO  not  get  excited,  you  Americans. 
If  you  keep  your  heads,  you  will 
come  through  this  all  right.  If  you  lose 
your  heads,  you  may  lose  much  besides — 
you  may  lose  more  than  you  can,  win 
back  in  a  hundred  years. 

I  am  not  excited.  I  have  not  lost  my 
head.  (Yes,  I  still  have  a  head,  and 
hands  and  feet.  If  I  should  try  to  live 
out  here  without  hands  and  feet,  the  ad- 
justment to  that  unaccustomed  condition 
would  have  a  reactionary  effect  upon  my 
head.  I  am  not  experimenting  in  the 
elimination  of  my  members.) 


110    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

You  see  a  country  now,  Russia,  that  is 
making  the  experiment  of  living  without 
its  head.  No  nation  can  continue  as  a  na- 
tion without  a  head,  and  a  level  one.  Even 
the  most  extremely  republican,  demo- 
cratic, socialistic,  or  any  other  kind  of  a 
nation  must  have  a  head.  A  completely 
anarchistic  aggregation  of  people  could 
not  be  called  a  nation.  Its  land  would  be 
only  a  geographical  section  populated 
with  units,  and  such  units  unrelated  to 
other  units  might  as  well  be  ciphers. 

Do  not  be  impatient  because  I  write 
seldom  at  present.  I  am  rather  busy.  I 
shall  always  come  when  I  have  something 
that  must  be  said. 

A  change  is  coming  in  America.  Quite 
a  change  has  already  come  about,  has  it 
not?* 

*  It  was  about  this  time,  if  I  remember  rightly, 
that  many  of  our  wealthy  men  began  working  for 
the  government  at  one  dollar  a  year. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  111 

This  country  is  great,  this  country  is 
strong,  this  country  is  adaptable.  It  can 
adjust  itself  to  change.  The  people  of 
this  country  have  not  been  slaves  for  a 
long  time.  The  people  of  Russia  have 
been  so  many  kinds  of  slaves  that  their 
reaction  to  freedom  is  unexpected  by  a 
free  world.  Wait!  Do  not  lose  your 
heads  about  this  matter. 

I  do  not  object  to  there  being  a  few 
persons  who  know  that  I  am  writing  with 
you  again.  They  cannot  affect  me,  save 
to  encourage  me  with  their  interest. 


112  LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  XIII 

TREES  AND  BRICK  WALLS 

May  16,  1917. 

YOU  fear  lest  the  dismal  prophecies 
of  world-disaster,  of  cataclysm,  of 
the  destruction  of  half  the  human  race 
which  you  hear  from  many  sources,  may 
tend  to  discourage  the  world. 

Remember  that  hope  springs  eternal  in 
the  human  hreast.  And  if  the  minds  of 
men  are  familiar  with  the  idea  of  cata- 
clysm, they  will  more  readily  adjust  them- 
selves to  lesser  changes. 

Read  the  Old  Testament.  The  most 
dismal  prophecies  were  not  verified,  but 
changes  came. 

Some  of  the  "independent  ministers"  of 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  113 

America  are  more  violent  than  Jeremiah. 
But  they  help  indirectly — in  accustoming 
the  minds  of  men  to  the  idea  of  change. 

If  panics  come — and  they  may — refuse 
to  be  panic-stricken. 

If  violence  comes — and  it  may — refuse 
to  be  violent. 

If  discouragements  come — and  they  will 
—refuse  to  be  discouraged. 

When  your  brains  become  over-heated, 
look  steadily  at  the  trees.  They  will 
quiet  you.  If  there  are  no  trees  in  your 
neighborhood — why,  look  at  a  brick  wall 
in  moments  of  excitement.  A  brick  wall 
is  a  soothing  spectacle.  It  stands  steady, 
unless  moved  from  without. 


114    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


INVISIBLE  AEMIES 

May  23,  1917. 

MANY  of  the  soldiers  out  here  who 
have  become  fully  awake  and 
self-conscious  are  striving  to  bring  about 
those  ends  for  which  they  gave  their  lives 
on  earth.  There  are  thus  soldiers  work- 
ing on  both  sides  of  the  war  and  on  this 
side  of  the  veil.  Immediately  after  the 
change  many  of  them  fight  each  other;  but 
they  soon  learn  that  they  can  do  more  ef- 
fective work  by  giving  attention  to  their 
comrades  in  the  flesh.  They  can  soothe 
and  inspire  and  instruct. 

We  are  forming  an  army  out  here. 
There  is  no  lack  of  recruits.     America 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  115 

/nust  be  saved,  and  few  of  you  know  how 
much  America  has  to  be  saved  from.  But 
we  know — we  who  have  watched  the  world 
for  the  last  two  years  and  three-quarters. 

It  is  not  so  terrible  to  die.  It  is  really 
far  more  terrible  to  be  born. 

The  army  that  we  are  recruiting  here  is 
made  up  of  men  of  all  ages — all  ages  in 
this  life,  I  mean.  Yes,  there  are  women 
also  in  our  army.  There  are  some  veter- 
ans of  the  Civil  War  and  veterans  of  the 
War  with  Spain.  Over  the  regiments  and 
divisions  of  this  army  there  are  command- 
ers, as  over  the  armies  of  earth.  Other- 
wise the  work  would  lack  unity  of  pur- 
pose. Ours  is  mostly  a  volunteer  army, 
though  conscription  is  not  unknown 
among  us. 

You  wonder  what  I  mean  ?  Do  you  not 
suppose  that  we  can  call  a  soul  from  a  use- 


116    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

less  occupation  and  give  him  useful  labor? 
We  can  and  do,  daily. 

We  have  even  recruited  largely  from 
the  old  and  native  Americans,  the  red 
skinned  hunters  and  warriors  who  remain 
in  such  large  numbers  in  the  neighborhood 
of  the  earth.  There  is  work  which  they 
only  can  do.  There  are  many  kinds  of 
work  and  a  great  variety  of  workers. 

I  come  and  go,  from  coast  to  coast.  I 
know  what  is  doing  on  the  shores  of  the 
Pacific,  in  the  Atlantic  States,  on  the  Gulf 
of  Mexico,  and  the  Middle  and  Rocky 
Mountain  States  are  familiar  ground  to 
me.  I  am  renewing  my  youth  in  this 
period  of  activity.  I  am  working  for  my 
country.  I  am  in  training,  too. 

Why  do  you  smile?  There  is  a  train- 
ing of  the  mind  and  the  will  that  is  more 
effective  than  any  training  of  the  physical 
body — quicker  and  more  effective.  Then 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  117 

too  the  astral  body  can  be  trained  to  a 
high  degree  of  efficiency  and  elasticity. 
Surely  I  need  not  tell  you  this. 

And  I  am  training  others.  We  old  fel- 
lows can  be  very  useful  in  a  time  like  this. 
I  am  glad  now  that  I  came  out  when  I  did, 
that  I  went  through  my  novitiate  while 
the  world  was  still  at  peace  and  there  was 
leisure  for  many  things  which  now  I 
should  not  have  time  for.  I  had  a  delight- 
ful holiday.  I  hunted  through  the  wilds 
of  the  invisible,  and  fished  in  the  waters  of 
space;  but  now  I  am  back  at  my  work 
again. 


118    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


THE  WEAKEST  LINK 

June  2,  1917. 

THERE  are  in  the  archives  of  the 
Masters  of  Wisdom  certain  data 
relative  to  the  past  and  future  of  this 
country  which  would  make  interesting 
reading  could  they  be  published  in  the 
newspapers  at  this  time  of  national  crisis. 
America  is  aware  of  her  mission  of  de- 
mocracy; but  she  is  not  aware  of  another 
mission  equally  potent — that  of  making 
the  world  safe  for  spiritual,  culture.  I  do 
not  mean  religion,  as  the  word  is  ordinarily 
used;  but  I  mean  the  culture  of  the  spirit 
of  love — such  ideas  of  love  as  the  world 
has  inadequately  grasped  from  the  teach- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  119 

ings  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  grasped  and  let 
fall  again  because  those  ideas  were  too 
warm  to  be  comfortably  held  by  hands 
cooled  in  the  material  labors  of  selfishness. 

America  has  laid  up  for  herself  in  the 
regions  beyond  the  physical  a  debt — an 
obligation  that  is  not  by  any  means  a 
treasure  in  heaven,  but  which,  when  the 
debt  is  paid,  may  be  a  real  spiritual  treas- 
ure. I  refer  to  the  armies  of  souls  who 
once  occupied  this  land  as  free  owners,  and 
who  were  expelled  and  disinherited  by  the 
expanding  civilization  which  grew  up  in 
the  place  of  wigwam  and  hunting-ground. 

Those  souls,  many  of  them,  desire  to  re- 
turn. Many  have  already  returned,  and 
unless  some  way  is  open  for  them  to  live 
again  the  free  life  to  which  they  were  ac- 
customed in  the  past,  they  will  tend  to  be- 
come a  destructive  force.  They  cannot  be 
eliminated  so  easily  now,  when  they  wear 


120    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

white  bodies  and  claim  citizenship  with 
you.  They  are  scattered  from  shore  to 
shore  of  this  wide  land.  You  can  tell 
them  by  their  eagle  eyes  and  their  high 
cheek  bones,  by  their  free  gait  and  their 
love  of  freedom.  They  are  hard  to  re- 
strain in  factory  and  counting-house. 
They  are  clerks  with  a  difference  and  la- 
borers with  a  dream.  Many  of  them  have 
found  entrance  into  the  sun-lighted  world 
as  the  children  of  European  immigrants, 
for  they  find  it  easier  to  enter  the  blood 
of  certain  other  races  than  the  blood  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon,  for  all  the  Anglo-Saxon 
love  of  freedom. 

A  time  may  come  when  these  now  for- 
eign-blooded primitive  Americans  will  in- 
stinctively rebel  against  the  restraining 
influences  that  have  held  them,  when  they 
will  seek  to  live  over  again  the  old  life  of 
nature,  even  though  they  have  to  take  it 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  121 

as  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  said  to  have 
been  taken. 

There  is  coming  a  time  when  love  will 
be  needed  in  this  land  as  it  has  never  been 
needed  before,  when  "live  and  let  live" 
must  become  a  law  as  well  as  a  phrase. 
Those  who  long  for  freedom  with  Nature 
can  be  given  that  freedom.  Conditions 
may  be  hard  in  the  great  cities. 

I  am  not  trying  to  instill  fear  into  the 
American  heart.  On  the  contrary,  I  am 
trying  to  insure  you  against  fear. 

Not  long  could  the  wheels  of  civiliza- 
tion stop  turning.  But  they  could  stop — 
for  a  wink  of  the  Cosmic  Eye. 

America  is  going  to  be  saved,  and  saved 
in  the  hour  of  her  greatest  danger.  What 
will  her  greatest  danger  be?  You  must 
think  that  out  for  yourself. 

Learn  to  see  through  the  eye  of  the 
Planetary  Spirit.  Your  view  is  too  nar- 


122    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

row.  Where  your  library  stands  on 
shelves  is  for  you  the  centre  of  things; 
but  the  centre  of  things  is  in  the  heart,  and 
hearts  are  everywhere.  If  you  think  about 
the  race  and  not  about  yourself,  your  heart 
will  be  magnified;  you  will  see  with  the 
eyes  of  the  heart,  and  he  who  sees  with 
the  eyes  of  the  heart  is  wiser  than  histori- 
ans or  intellectual  prophets. 

The  world  must  be  made  safe  for  love. 
All  men  must  be  provided  foroin  the 
scheme  of  the  future,  all  men  and  women 
and  little  children.  It  is  not  safe  to  dis- 
regard any,  for  a  chain, is  as  strong  as 
its  weakest  link,  and  every  link  must  be 
made  strong. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  123 


LETTER  XVI 

A  COUNCIL  IN  THE  FOREST 

ONE  night,  to  repose  my  soul  from 
the  labors  I  had  undertaken,  I  re- 
tired to  a  pine  forest  upon  the  earth,  in 
one  of  the  New  England  States.  Think- 
ing to  be  alone,  I  had  sought  the  place ;  but 
no  sooner  had  I  drifted  into  meditation 
than  a  strange  sound  fell  upon  my  ears. 
It  was  not  like  the  sounds  of  earth,  it  was 
more  subtle  yet  more  penetrating;  and  I 
knew  that  I  was  listening  to  a  song  (if 
you  may  call  it  a  song)  by  some  of  my  fel- 
low sojourners  in  the  region  beyond  the 
sunlight. 

Suddenly  with  a  rush  they  leaped  past 
me  into  the  clearing,  and  forming  in  a 


124     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

circle,  they  waited.  Then  I  saw  a  light 
that  was  not  of  earthly  origin,  the  light  of 
a  campfire,  and  I  knew  that  I  had  been 
surprised  by  a  band  of  Indians  who  were 
preparing  to  hold  some  rite  of  their  old  re- 
ligion. 

Though  I  had  not  been  invited  to  their 
ceremony,  neither  had  I  invited  them  to 
intrude  upon  my  contemplation,  so  I  re- 
mained and  watched  them. 

(Yes,  there  is  less  secrecy  out  here,  for 
the  reason  that  there  is  greater  under- 
standing and  greater  tolerance.) 

Soon  I  was  looking  on  at  a  strange 
dance.  All  in  a  circle  they  swung  round 
and  round  the  blazing  fire,  singing  and 
leaping.  I  did  not  know  the  meaning  of 
the  words  they  sang;  but  I  could  read 
their  minds  by  the  thought-images  they 
formed,  and  I  knew  that  they  were  cele- 
brating the  date — reached  by  what  lunar 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  125 

reckoning  I  knew  not — of  some  great  In- 
dian massacre  in  which  they  had  taken 
part  a  hundred  or  two  hundred  years  ago. 

And  the  impulse  of  their  dance,  the  mo- 
tive power  of  it,  was  hatred  of  the  white 
man  who  had  scattered  them  and  driven 
them  away  from  their  old  hunting 
grounds. 

Shocked,  yet  fascinated  by  this  inner 
glimpse  at  the  souls  of  the  American 
aborigines,  I  watched  them. 

Though  I  am  not  skilled  in  magic  ritu- 
als, I  soon  perceived  that  there  was  form 
and  method  in  this  dance,  method  and 
form  and  a  hostile  purpose. 

They  were,  by  exciting  themselves  and 
by  fixity  of  thought,  trying  to  excite  a 
scattered  company  of  men  in  these  United 
States — men  of  a  low  grade  of  intellect 
but  of  psychic  temperament — to  deeds  of 
violence  and  destruction. 


126    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

"So  that  is  the  way  they  do  it!"  I 
thought. 

Then  I  drew  a  veil  around  my  thoughts, 
that  they  might  not  be  perceived  by  the 
beings  before  me.  Yes,  I  can  do  that, 
and  so  can  many  men  upon  the  earth. 

I  could  smell  the  keen  fresh  odors  of 
the  pine  grove,  and  I  could  feel  the  rising 
wind  as  it  swept  across  the  clearing;  for 
the  wind  seemed  to  respond  to  their  call 
and  to  offer  its  forces  to  them.  You  must 
know  that  the  elements  are  impersonal, 
though  semi-personalities  inhabit  them, 
and  that  the  elements  and  these  semi-per- 
sonalities can  be  used  and  guided,  for 
purposes  good  or  evil,  by  any  being  who 
has  gained  that  peculiar  power  in  one  or 
many  lives. 

And  looking  off  in  the  distance,  I  could 
see  that  the  wind  as  it  swept  along  carried 
the  thoughts  and  passions  of  these  long 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  127 

dead  men,  these  souls  that  by  reason  of 
their  downward  tendencies  had  not  broken 
away  from  the  attraction  of  matter,  the 
astral  gravitation  that  makes  so  many 
souls  earth-bound. 

Still  looking  off  and  projecting  my 
consciousness  in  a  way  I  have  learned  to 
do,  I  saw  the  influence  of  this  magic  ritual 
of  revenge  and  menace  as  it  touched  the 
minds  of  men  far  scattered.  I  saw  their 
thoughts  take  on  suddenly  the  tinge  of 
hatred,  hatred  for  the  civilization  in  which 
they  had  failed  to  realize  their  personal 
desires. 

And  I  knew  that  on  that  night  and  on 
the  morrow,  and  at  intervals  for  many 
days,  deeds  of  violence  would  be  commit- 
ted, that  property  would  be  destroyed,  and 
men  of  order  threatened. 

My  heart  was  sad,  for  I  had  not  under- 
stood before  how  real  was  the  danger  to 


my  country  in  these  times  of  crisis  from 
the  karma  the  old  settlers  had  made.  Of 
course  they  believed  they  were  doing  right 
in  ridding  themselves  and  their  adopted 
land  from  the  simple  but  complex  natives, 
whose  civilization  was  older  than  the  civi- 
lization of  Europe,  and  who  had  loved  this 
land  as  only  those  can  love  a  land  who 
have  known  the  freedom  of  its  spaces. 

When  the  magic  dance  was  over,  and 
one  by  one  and  two  by  two  the  communi- 
cants slipped  away  among  the  shadows,  I 
strode  forward  into  the  circle  to  have 
speech  with  any  who  should  willingly  re- 
spond to  my  desire  for  acquaintanceship. 

Suddenly  I  found  myself  face  to  face 
with  a  majestic  chieftain,  wearing  one  of 
those  long  feather  bonnets  whose  every 
feather  marks  some  deed  of  daring  or 
achievement.  (What  a  splendid  custom 
was  that!  What  an  incentive  to  action! 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  129 

Truly  among  the  red  men,  deeds  won  a 
feather  in  the  cap.) 

His  face  was  like  that  of  a  hawk,  and 
his  eyes  were  bright  with  an  inner  fire, 
that  intensity  of  feeling  and  thought  com- 
mingled which  marks  the  leader  and  mas- 
ter of  men  and  him  alone. 

And  I  said  to  him  in  the  forms  of 
thought,  for  I  knew  no  word  of  his  old 
language : 

"I  have  been  an  unintentional  witness 
to  your  ceremony  this  evening.  Will  you 
enlighten  me  further  as  to  its  purpose? 
for  I  see  that  it  was  directed  towards  the 
land  of  breathing  men." 

With  a  sweep  of  his  authoritative  arm 
he  dismissed  the  few  of  his  companions 
who  had  not  already  moved  away  among 
the  trees,  and  we  two  were  alone  together. 

"I  come  as  a  friend,"  I  said,  seeing  that 
he  hesitated. 


130    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

And  the  word  was  true;  for  I  saw  that 
whatever  harm  he  mistakenly  sought  to 
accomplish,  in  his  soul  was  the  conscious- 
ness of  justice,  that  fundamental  balance 
between  right  and  wrong,  that  proposition 
of  law,  which  when  native  in  the  mind 
gives  it  dignity  and  attracts  respect.  This 
was  no  dabbler  in  aboriginal  and  nasty 
sorcery,  but  a  kind  of  priest  of  retribution, 
a  tribal  demi-god  who  might  perhaps  some 
day  be  made  constructive  and  not  destruc- 
tive, an  instrument  of  the  great  Genius  of 
America  of  which  I  have  spoken  in  a 
former  letter,  the  Weaver  of  Destiny  who 
has  our  land  in  charge. 

We  measured  each  other  with  the  eyes, 
and  I  cast  aside  the  veil  that  I  had  be- 
fore drawn  around  my  thoughts,  that  he 
might  see  me  mind  to  mind  and  realize 
that  I  respected  and  to  a  degree  under- 
stood him. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  131 

"You  have  seen  what  you  have  seen," 
he  observed. 

"And  you  do  not  resent  my  presence?" 

"No." 

The  fresh  odor  of  the  pine  grove  was 
keen  in  my  senses,  and  my  new-found  com- 
panion threw  back  his  head  with  a  splen- 
did motion  as  if  to  drink  it  in. 

"Freedom  is  good,"  he  said,  "and  the 
land  was  ours." 

So  I  perceived  that  by  excusing  him- 
self and  his  associates  he  had  perceived 
that  I  accused  them.  Then  I  knew  that 
I  could  really  commune  with  him  mind 
to  mind,  and  I  was  glad;  for  I  ever  seek 
to  extend  the  range  of  my  knowledge  and 
to  form  acquaintance  with  those  of  sturdy 
will. 

"But  the  land  is  free  to  all  the  world," 
I  said,  "to  you  and  to  me,  and  to  those  of 
both  our  races." 


132    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

"We  do  not  see  it  so,"  was  his  reply. 

"But,"  I  insisted,  "are  we  not  now,  you 
and  I,  enjoying  it  in  freedom?" 

It  is  difficult  to  translate  in  words  the 
rapid  give  and  take  of  our  thoughts,  the 
pictures  that  flashed  back  and  forth  be- 
tween us,  as  I  strove  with  kindliness  and 
will  to  make  him  understand  that  the  wel- 
fare of  his  race  did  not  call  for  the  de- 
struction of  mine. 

I  told  him — and  the  idea  was  so  new  to 
him  that,  lacking  words,  I  had  to  draw  my 
story  on  the  canvas  of  thought  in  the 
minutest  detail — how  the  soul  that  leaves 
the  earth  for  a  time  returns  to  it  in  an- 
other form.  And  I  explained  how  hun- 
dreds upon  hundreds  of  his  people,  and 
the  most  advanced  among  them,  had  al- 
ready come  back  in  material  form  to  that 
America  they  had  loved  before,  that  they 
wore  white  bodies,  and  could  only  be  dis- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  133 

tinguished  from  other  white  men  by  the 
keenness  of  their  eyes,  their  gait,  and  cer- 
tain peculiarities  of  speech  and  manner. 

He  followed  my  story  with  astonished, 
almost  painful,  intensity;  for  he  knew, 
with  that  inner  knowledge  which  on  this 
side  of  life  is  almost  impossible  to  deceive, 
that  I  spoke  honestly  and  believed  that 
which  I  told  him. 

"And  do  you  not  deceive  yourself?"  was 
his  inevitable  question. 

Then  I  told  him  of  those  recent  and 
former  lives  of  my  own  which  I  most 
vividly  remember,  and  cited  proofs  that  I 
did  not  deceive  myself. 

"But  what  a  life  is  that  of  the  white 
man  for  one  of  my  people?"  he  demanded. 

Then  he  flashed  me  picture  after  pic- 
ture of  the  simple  white  man's  life  in 
America,  the  schoolhouse  with  the  chok- 
ing-hot  stove  and  the  bad  air,  the  house 


134    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  home  with  closed  doors  and  windows, 
the  "meeting-house"  where  a  droning  or 
a  noisy  preacher  prated  of  things  he  did 
not  understand,  to  others  who  believed  or 
did  not  believe  that  they  believed  him. 
He  held  up  before  me  as  for  ridicule  the 
clothing  of  the  white  man  in  the  lower 
walks  of  life,  the  confining  and  uncom- 
fortable shoes,  the  binding  trousers,  the 
ugly  hat  that  makes  bald  the  head,  and 
the  collar.  The  one  he  pictured  was  a 
paper  collar,  soiled  and  wilted  at  the 
edges. 

Then  he  showed  me — as  if  to  prove  the 
breadth  of  his  observations — an  office  in  a 
city,  with  the  clerks  seated  upon  stools 
and  bent  with  aching  backs  over  ledgers 
that  contained  figures,  figures,  long  lines 
of  figures  that  were  the  symbols  of  the 
white  man's  wampum,  which  seemed  so 
trivial  when  made  the  principal  occupa- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  135 

tion  of  a  soul  that  had  rejoiced  in  the  red 
man's  forest. 

"And  is  it  for  this  that  they  come  back 
to  their  native  land?"  he  asked. 

"But  the  soul  must  gain  all  experience," 
I  said. 

The  idea  seemed  new  to  him,  and  he 
pondered  it  with  knitted  brows. 

"Why  should  the  soul  gain  all  experi- 
ence?" he  asked. 

"That  it  may  return  to  its  God  rich  in 
knowledge,"  I  replied. 

"Its  God."  At  that  thought  the  strange 
eyes  of  him  lighted,  though  his  face  re- 
mained immobile. 

"Yes,"  I  said,  "for  your  God  and  my 
God  are  both  God." 

"There  are  many  gods,"  he  replied. 
"There  is  the  Great  Spirit,  and  there  are 
the  others." 

"In  the  centre  of  each  of  them,"  I  as- 


136    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

sured  him,  "there  is  a  spot,  a  core  of  the 
heart  that  is  the  same  in  all,  that  exists 
everywhere,  and  in  every  heart  is  one,  that 
knows  no  division;  and  that  centre  is  also 
in  your  heart  and  mine  and  in  that  of  our 
respective  Gods." 

"Did  you  learn  that  in  one  of  those  hot 
schoolhouses  ?"  he  asked. 

"No.  I  did  not  learn  it  even  when  I 
was  an  old  man  upon  the  earth,  but  after 
I  came  out  here.  On  earth  I  rather 
prided  myself  on  my  separateness." 

"Then  one  can  learn  new  religions  out 
here?"  he  asked,  in  surprise. 

"If  one  finds  a  teacher,"  I  replied. 

"But  what  need  is  there  of  new  re- 
ligions?" 

"There  is,"  I  said,  "in  the  core  of  every 
religion  also  that  central  spot  where  all 
are  one.  And  there  is  in  all  races,"  I  pur- 
sued, for  I  saw  that  he  watched  with  half- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  137 

belief,  "there  is  in  all  races  a  core  of 
unity.  The  red  man  is  the  brother  and 
not  the  permanent  enemy  of  the  white 
man.  So  why  should  you  injure  the 
descendants  of  those  who  followed  what 
they  believed  to  be  right  in  extending  their 
holdings  in  this  land  long  ago?" 

"But  I  was  not  seeking  to  injure  them 
for  injury's  sake." 

"Then  I  misunderstood  the  purpose  of 
your  magic  song." 

"Oh!"  he  exclaimed.  "You  caught  the 
feeling  of  my  children,  who  cannot  see  be- 
yond feeling.  My  purpose  is  only  to 
destroy  the  present  to  make  way  for  the 
old  life." 

"But  the  present  is  always  a  stage,"  I 
said,  "on  the  highroad  that  leads  to  the 
future.  And  my  people  reincarnated, 
and  yours  reincarnated — or  so  many  of 
them  as  are  ready  to  go  on — shall  go  on 


138    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

together  and  in  this  land.  They  will 
form,  with  those  who  join  them  from  be- 
yond the  seas,  a  new  race.  And  thanks 
to  the  labors  of  a  few  among  the  white 
men  who  have  studied  and  appreciated  the 
traditions  and  civilization  of  the  red  man 
and  sought  to  save  them  from  utter 
obliteration,  the  old  forest  lore  will  become 
a  part  of  the  inheritance  of  that  new  race 
which  is  to  grow  out  of  the  union  of  yours 
and  mine  and  the  others.  And  for  a  part 
of  every  year,  when  the  life  of  the  new  race 
is  adjusted,  the  boys  and  girls  and  men 
and  women  will  go  out  to  the  wilds  and 
enjoy  the  freedom  of  the  tent  and  the 
society  round  the  campfire,  and  we  shall 
be  brothers — real  blood-brothers — at  last, 
and  all  the  old  wounds  shall  be  healed. 
Can  you  not  recognize  me  as  your 
brother?" 

He  nodded  his  head. 


"And  will  you  not  spread  among  your 
people  the  glad  tidings  of  the  new  race, 
in  all  of  whose  possessions  they  will 
share?" 

We  stood  long  looking  in  each  other's 
eyes,  and  I  told  him  more  than  I  could 
record  here  if  I  held  the  use  of  your  pencil 
for  many  hours.  In  the  end  he  under- 
stood me. 

It  is  my  belief  that  he  will  spread  the 
story  among  his  people,  and  that  one 
danger  will  be  lessened  thereby,  to  some 
degree,  for  the  children  of  the  new  race. 


140  LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  XVII 

THE  IDEAL  OF  SUCCESS 

June  23, 1917. 

PUT  fear  out  of  your  hearts.  The 
future  will  give  you  no  greater 
lessons  than  you  can  master.  It  is  not 
well  to  know  the  future  in  complete  detail. 
Had  the  world  known  during  the  last  ten 
years  all  it  would  be  obliged  to  suffer  in 
this  war,  would  it  have  made  the  progress 
it  has  made  in  art,  science  and  commerce? 
No.  Every  thought  would  have  been 
haunted. 

You  may  say  that  the  weaker  races  (and 
the  stronger  ones)  would  have  made  bet- 
ter preparation.  But  a  part  of  this  les- 
son has  been  not  to  delay  inevitable  prepa- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  141 

ration,  and  to  know  in  future  that  a  na- 
tion which  idealizes  war  and  is  mostly 
army,  has  not  cultivated  that  ideal  and 
that  army  solely  for  its  own  amusement. 

If  you  want  to  understand  national  life 
and  individual  life,  you  must  look  for  their 
dominating  ideals.  An  ideal  is  a  tend- 
ency. 

What  is  the  dominating  ideal  of  Amer- 
ica? Summed  in  a  word,  it  is  success,  is 
it  not?  Now  America  is  in  a  great  war, 
and  you  may  be  sure  that  she  will  leave 
nothing  undone  that  can  make  for  success 
in  that  war,  as  she  has  left  nothing  undone 
that  could  make  for  success  in  business. 

Take  your  own  case.  What  are  your 
dominating  ideals  and  tendencies?  You 
would  say,  off -hand,  work  and  study  and 
intellectual  companionship,  would  you 
not?  Very  well.  As  to  work,  do  not 
fear  a  future  in  which  good  work  is  pretty 


142    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

sure  of  at  least  a  living  wage.  Study? 
There  will  always  be  books  to  feed  your 
hunger  for  reading.  Companionship? 
There  are  too  many  lonely  souls  in  the 
world  for  you  ever  to  be  lonely. 

What  else?  You  lift  your  pencil  and 
think.  .  .  .  That  is  about  all,  is  it  not? 

Now  let  us  return  to  America.  Amer- 
ica is  not — has  not  been — a  warlike  na- 
tion, except  when  threatened  by  injustice, 
to  herself  or  others.  Will  she  lose  this 
war?  I  think  not. 

But  there  will  be  complexities  regard- 
ing the  end  of  this  war. 

I  want  to  refer  to  something  I  said 
in  a  recent  letter,  that  we  were  organizing 
on  this  side  of  the  airy  frontier  for  work 
for  the  future  of  America. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  Genius  of  this  land, 
a  composite  entity  you  may  call  it,  if  your 
imagination  is  not  equal  to  the  task  of 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  143 

seeing  that  you — all  of  you — are  cells  in 
the  body  of  the  Genius  of  America. 

Now  the  Genius  of  this  land  has  glori- 
ous purposes,  and  she  uses  you — all  of 
you — for  her  purposes,  as  you  use  the  cells 
of  your  body,  as  you  are  using  at  this 
moment  the  aggregation  of  cells  that  form 
the  hand  with  which  you  hold  your  pencil. 

In  registering  yourselves  at  the  call  of 
your  country,  you  are  affirming  your  ac- 
ceptance of  the  office  of  cells  in  the  great 
body  of  her.  Some  of  you  she  must  sac- 
rifice in  the  war  for  the  welfare  of  the 
whole,  as  every  day  cells  die  and  are  born 
in  the  body  of  man,  the  microcosm. 

Extend  the  idea  to  the  whole  human 
race,  and  the  figure  will  be  still  more  apt. 
The  genius  of  the  race  is  suffering  now. 
The  process  will  ultimate  in  a  more  per- 
fect health. 

You  perhaps  protest  that  many  of  those 


144    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

who  are  dying  are  the  flower  of  the  race, 
the  young,  the  fitted  to  survive.  But  do 
you  not  rememher  that  their  souls  sur- 
vive? The  essential  part  of  them  is  not 
lost,  but  set  free  for  a  greater  work. 
Have  you  considered  that  earth-life  may 
be  the  dream,  and  the  life  after  death  the 
waking?  Sages  have  considered  it  before 
you,  and  accepted  the  possibility. 

Out  here  we  are  hopeful,  and  very 
busy.  It  is  because  I  am  so  busy  that  I 
come  to  you  only  occasionally.  Do  not 
hurry  me,  for  I  do  not  hurry  you. 

We  have  problems  to  solve  out  here. 
As  I  have  said,  one  of  our  problems  is  the 
great  number  of  Indian  souls,  red  men 
souls,  who  went  out  of  life  with  resent- 
ment and  revenge  in  their  hearts  for  the 
elimination  of  their  race  by  the  white  man 
in  America. 

Somehow  we  must  placate  them,  and 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  145 

enlist  them  on  your  side.  Otherwise  they 
may  be  a  dangerous  element  for  the  fu- 
ture. Some  of  them  would  like  to  see 
your  civilization  destroyed,  as  theirs  was 
destroyed,  and  a  few  of  them  are  strong 
enough  to  do  real  harm. 

The  best  way  to  make  an  enemy  harm- 
less is  to  understand  his  peculiar  qualities, 
to  learn  something  from  the  frankness  of 
his  enmity,  to  turn  away  evil  by  letting 
it  go  off  at  a  tangent.  But  the  Indian 
souls  are  not  famous  for  their  frankness. 
Even  with  me  they  sometimes  conceal 
their  resentment — deep,  fundamental — 
at  the  "theft,"  as  they  feel  it,  of  the  land 
where  they  once  roamed  in  freedom. 

I  advise  America  to  cultivate  the  free 
life  of  the  open.  I  have  advised  you  in  a 
former  book  that  the  old  woodcraft  should 
be  resuscitated  and  taught  to  the  children. 
There  may  come  a  time  when  the  rudi- 


146    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

ments  of  this  knowledge  will  be  useful  to 
many  of  you. 

Great  changes  are  coming  in  the  world, 
a  period  of  adjustment  to  new  conditions. 
There  is  a  restless  element  in  all  adjust- 
ment, anci  national  restlessness  is  like  that 
of  puberty;  it  needs  to  be  minimized  by 
healthful  outdoor  play,  or  by  work  which 
masquerades  as  play. 

The  future  will  take  from  the  present 
those  elements  that  are  most  important  for 
survival. 

Do  not  fear  that  we  shall  return  to  the 
Dark  Ages.  Oh,  no.  We  are  going  into 
a  Light  Age.  It  is  only  twilight  now. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  147 


LETTER  XVIII 

ORDER  AND  PROGRESS 

July  18, 1917. 

OUR  purpose  is  to  make  the  changes 
that  must  come,  come  gradually. 
We  want  to  avoid  sudden  changes. 

You  in  the  world  have  no  faint  idea  of 
the  influence  and  power  we  can  wield  on 
our  side.  We  can  speak  to  the  minds  of 
men  without  their  knowing  whence  the 
ideas  come.  They  think,  when  a  sudden 
idea  comes  into  their  minds,  that  they  have 
evolved  it;  but  sudden  ideas  generally 
come  from  outside.  (I  put  one  in  your 
mind  this  morning,  then  ran  away  before 
you  could  recognize  me.  Why  did  I  run 


148    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

away  ?  Because  I  wanted  you  to  use  your 
own  judgment.) 

Just  at  present  we  are  trying  to  encour- 
age America  as  to  her  future — her  orderly 
and  peaceful  future,  after  peace  is  de- 
clared in  Europe. 

You  may  as  well  know  that  there  are 
many  out  here  who  are  anxious  about  the 
future  of  the  world.  All  men  do  not 
cease  to  worry  when  they  have  left  their 
bodies.  There  are  many  here  who  think 
the  world  is  going  to  smash.  They  al- 
ways had  that  fear  in  life  whenever  things 
seemed  to  go  wrong;  and  now  they  are  no 
less  inclined  to  accept  every  perplexity 
as  an  omen  of  failure  and  confusion. 

All  over  America  there  are  men  and 
women — and  many  of  them  are  in  pulpits 
and  on  platforms — who  are  croaking  away 
about  the  destruction  of  society  following 
this  war.  Bless  your  troubled  hearts! 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  149 

Society  is  not  going  to  be  destroyed. 
Some  elements  in  society  will  be  gradu- 
ally done  away  with,  and  good  riddance  to 
them!  But  society  has  made  too  great 
advance,  in  mechanical  and  intellectual 
ways,  to  permit  its  structure  to  be  pulled 
from  beneath  its  feet. 

Do  not  worry.  Watch  out,  but  do  not 
worry.  As  Abraham  Lincoln  once  pre- 
vented this  country  from  being  terri- 
torially divided  and  thus  weakened,  so  he 
and  others  are  now  working  to  prevent  a 
spiritual  division  that  would  be  even  more 
disastrous. 

No,  we  are  not  going  to  see  your  useful 
inventions  and  your  structures  that  the 
future  has  need  of,  cast  into  the  rubbish 
heap  by  reckless  violence  and  extrava- 
gance. What  is  useful  must  be  conserved. 
What  is  useless  for  the  future  can  be  made 
over  into  something  useful. 


150    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

Humanity  has  not  been  in  the  habit  of 
taking  sudden  jumps.  It  has  put  one 
foot  regularly  before  the  other,  and  gone 
ahead  rather  steadily.  The  way  of  man 
in  the  past  has  been  to  improve  and  make 
over,  rather  than  suddenly  to  discard  its 
institutions,  or  even  its  garments.  Only 
that  which  is  really  worn  out  is  cast  away. 
And  our  financial  system,  and  our  social 
system  in  general,  will  be  improved  and 
not  discarded.  Did  you  think  we  were  go- 
ing back  to  wampum?  Oh,  no! 

There  is  a  strong  pull  from  this  side, 
and  from  those  who  inhabited  your  conti- 
nent, to  simplify  the  life  in  America.  But 
America  is  no  longer  isolate.  She  has 
now  taken  her  place  in  the  republic  of  na- 
tions. 

Some  of  the  souls  who  used  to  be 
American  Indians  would  like  to  see  Amer- 
ica resume  wigwams  and  campfires,  be- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  151 

cause  those  souls  want  to  come  back,  and 
they  dread  the  complexity  of  modern 
American  life.  But  there  are  teachers 
here — and  some  of  them  red  teachers — 
who  can  instruct  the  souls  behindhand  in 
adaptability. 

I  have  told  you  that  there  is  an  influ- 
ence tending  to  draw  America  backward. 
But  I  have  not  told  you  to  be  panicky  re- 
garding the  fact.  There  are  reaction- 
aries— even  in  your  world. 

The  influence  from  this  side  is  subtle. 
But  the  majority  here  who  desire  to  lead 
the  world,  desire  to  lead  it  forward  and 
not  back.  The  world  will  go  forward. 

Yes,  the  souls  you  call  the  "departed" 
are  organizing  themselves.  They  realize 
that  their  influence  can  be  more  effective 
if  it  has  a  purpose  and  a  program.  For 
a  time  after  the  war  began  there  was  great 
confusion  out  here,  but  things  are  becom- 


152    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

ing  more  orderly.  Minds  are  becoming 
more  united.  Many  of  us  who  have  com- 
mon sense  and  some  measure  of  political 
judgment  give  most  of  our  time  to  lectur- 
ing here  and  there,  wherever  we  can  draw 
a  crowd  together.  That  is  one  reason  why 
you  have  seen  me  so  seldom  of  late.  I 
have  been  busier  than  ever  before.  Know- 
ing that  a  time  is  coming  soon  when  I  can 
rest  from  my  present  labors,  I  am  using 
my  strength  as  fast  as  I  generate  it.  For 
those  whom  I  convince  that  America  and 
other  countries  are  going  forward — must 
go  forward  to  greater  activity — seek  to 
convince  others  in  their  turn.  No  lec- 
turer on  earth  ever  had  so  busy  a  month 
as  I  have  had  this  last  month.  I  have 
spoken  to  hundreds  several  times  every 
day,  going  from  place  to  place,  from  State 
to  State,  from  city  to  city.  I  can  speak 
jn  San  Francisco  in  the  morning,  in  New 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  153 

York  at  noon,  in  New  Orleans  at  two 
o'clock,  in  Butte,  Montana,  in  the  even- 
ing. I  am  not  limited  to  railway  time- 
tables, nor  do  I  pay  my  fare. 

Believe  me,  we  are  going  to  save  Amer- 
ica, and  we  are  going  to  save  the  world. 
For  the  Masters  are  behind  us,  and  they 
will  not  let  the  world  be  destroyed. 

I  should  not  like  you  to  know  how 
near  it  has  been  to  destruction  more  than 
once  during  the  last  three  years.  But  the 
forces  of  premeditated  evil  against  which 
we  fought  so  long  have  been  scattered 
now,  and  though  they  have  not  been  de- 
stroyed, their  effect  has  been  greatly 
lessened.  What  we  have  reason  to  fear 
now  is  the  unwisdom  of  those  who  believe 
they  wish  good  to  the  world — the  imwis- 
dom  of  fanatics  and  agitators  and  fuss- 
budgets  of  all  sorts,  stirring  up  confusion 


154    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  darkening  counsel  with  their  unprac 
tical  and  conflicting  ideas. 

Order,  order,  order!  That  is  what  the 
world  must  strive  for  in  the  period  of  re- 
action which  will  follow  this  war.  The  re- 
action must  be  reckoned  with;  but  it  will 
be  only  a  brief  rest  of  overwearied  hearts, 
who  will  again  begin  building. 

It  is  in  that  building  period  that  I  hope 
for  America,  because  she  will  be  less  tired 
than  the  other  members  of  the  great 
world  brotherhood.  But  in  America  at 
that  time  there  will  be  a  danger.  I  tell 
you  that,  lest  you  be  taken  unawares  and 
relax  your  attention. 

Be  watchful,  but  not  over-anxious. 

And  trust  the  Masters  of  Life  somehow 
to  lead  you  through. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  155 


LETTER  XIX 

THE  FEDERATION  OF  NATIONS 

August  9, 1917. 

THE  time  has  now  come  for  Amer- 
ica to  get  out  into  the  world  and 
take  her  place  in  the  federation  of  na- 
tions. Let  her  unite  with  England  in  a 
strong  bond,  and  thereby  she  can  keep  the 
peace  of  the  world. 

The  isolation  of  America  in  the  past 
has  been  in  line  with  her  destiny;  it  was 
necessary  for  her  to  develop  to  her  present 
state  of  power  without  interruptions,  or 
the  influence  of  international  complica- 
tions upon  her  statesmen.  Free  and 
alone,  she  has  not  had  to  become  a  part  of 
the  great  and  creaking  machine  of  inter- 


156    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

national  diplomacy  and  intrigue.  But 
now  she  is  independent,  and,  politically- 
speaking,  her  character  is  formed.  You 
may  say  that  America  has  attained  her 
majority,  and  is  entitled  to  vote  in  the 
councils  and  elections  of  the  world. 

She  has  much  to  do  for  both  France  and 
England,  as  they  have  both  done  so  much 
for  her  in  the  past.  They  have  formed 
her  culture  and  influenced  her  spirit;  now 
she  will  influence  their  spirit. 

When  you  read  the  other  day  of  the 
work  which  our  soldiers  are  doing  in 
France,  helping  in  many  little  ways  in  the 
villages  and  on  the  farms,  your  heart 
glowed  with  pleasure;  you  remembered 
what  I  said  to  you  before  America  came 
into  the  war,  that  our  men  were  to  go  to 
France  and  to  work,  work,  work  for  the 
upbuilding  of  France. 

That  is  only  the  beginning.    More  and 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  157 

more  will  our  men  work  over  there,  dur- 
ing and  after  war. 

Soon  there  will  come  a  call  for  a  new 
kind  of  work — new  for  us. 

There  is  deep  meaning  in  this  bringing 
together  of  the  nations  for  a  common 
cause.  From  that,  there  is  only  a  step  to 
the  bringing  together  of  all  nations  for 
one  cause. 

The  force  of  revolt  in  the  world  must 
spend  itself,  as  the  force  of  race  hatred 
has  spent  itself — for  it  is  already  spent. 
The  continuation  of  the  war  will  be  prac- 
tically without  the  rage  of  the  beginning. 
We  go  on  because  it  is  our  job,  and  even 
in  New  York  now  there  is  no  longer  the 
fierceness  of  two  years  ago.  And  in  Eng- 
land it  is  lessened,  and  in  France  it  is  less- 
ened, and  in  Germany  it  is  lessened.  War 
has  now  become  a  task  like  any  other,  to 


158    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

be  gone  through  with.     When  it  no  longer 
seems  worth  while,  it  will  stop. 

The  question  of  America's  part  in  the 
federation  of  states  interests  me  now. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  159 


LETTER  XX 

THE  NEW  IDEAL 

August  19, 1917. 

SINCE  Germany  evolved  her  idea  of 
flamboyant  nationalism  and  tried 
to  foist  it  upon  the  world  in  imperial 
fashion,  the  world  has  grown  skeptical  of 
the  national  fetish.  It  will  believe  in  the 
good  intentions  of  no  nation  or  race  that 
flaunts  its  perfections  in  the  face  of  friend 
or  enemy. 

America,  as  she  grows  more  and  more 
sure  of  her  high  destiny,  must  also  grow 
more  modest.  She  must  realize  herself  as 
one  of  the  sister  states  in  the  great  com- 
monwealth of  nations,  and  the  eagle  will 
take  lessons  in  voice  culture.  As  a  quiet 


160    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

voice  can  make  itself  heard  in  a  medley  of 
noises  where  a  screaming  voice  would  be 
inaudible,  so  must  America's  voice  be- 
come deep  and  quiet. 

She  is  paying  for  her  place  in  the  coun- 
cils of  the  world.  Let  her  voice  be  heard 
by  reason  of  its  dignified  and  restrained 
accents. 

A  great  change  is  taking  place  in 
Europe,  in  its  conception  of  the  American 
character.  Hitherto  France  has  known 
the  American  tourist,  and  the  uprooted 
American  who  lived  there  in  preference 
to  his  own  country.  Now  France  is  learn- 
ing something  about  the  American  man 
in  his  workaday,  playaday,  fighting  and 
loving,  living  and  dying  sublimity.  She 
has  rubbed  her  eyes  as  she  watched  him, 
wondering  if  she  were  awake.  She  has 
recognized  a  new  type.  She  does  not  un- 
derstand it  yet,  but  she  wants  to  under- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  161 

stand  it.  There  is  a  new  and  disturbing 
warmth  now  at  the  heart  of  France  for 
this  new  brother  from  across  the  seas. 
She  sees  (for  she  is  subtle)  the  crudity 
of  him  as  measured  by  her  more  artificial 
standards.  But  she  sees  also  the  grandeur 
and  chivalry  of  him,  as  compared  with 
her  old  idea  of  the  foreigner. 

Ah,  America  and  Americans !  You  are 
on  trial  now  in  the  courts  of  the  world's 
judgment  as  you  have  never  been  before. 
My  heart  is  aglow  as  I  see  our  boys  go 
out  into  the  larger  world,  carrying  with 
them  the  clear  outdoor  spirit  of  the  Amer- 
ican plains  and  woodlands.  When  I  see 
the  eyes  of  the  sublime  and  pain-chastened 
French  grow  deep  and  warm  as  they  rest 
upon  our  boys,  I  am  so  proud  of  them! 
I  forget  that  I  also  am  uprooted,  having 
left  the  land  of  my  birth  for  the  regions 
beyond  death. 


162    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

In  the  councils  at  the  ending  of  the  war 
and  after  the  war,  may  the  modesty  of 
greatness  restrain  America  from  any 
suggestion  to  France  or  England  that  she 
saved  them  from  destruction.  I  clasp  my 
hands — to  you  they  would  be  shadowy 
hands — together  with  excess  of  emotion, 
as  I  pray  for  the  guidance  of  America  in 
the  councils  that  are  to  come. 

Modesty — let  that  be  the  watchword. 

The  soul  of  France  is  aflame  with  grati- 
tude, the  soul  of  France  is  aflame  with 
love.  The  hearts  of  the  French  people 
in  the  night  grow  warm  and  their  eyes 
grow  wet  as  they  whisper  to  themselves, 
"Les  Americains !  Les  Americains  1" 

Oh,  be  mindful  of  the  love  you  have 
won! 

I  would  die  all  over  again  a  thousand 
times  rather  than  see  my  Americans  dis- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  163 

appoint  their  French  brethren  in  this 
crisis  of  the  worlcUs  life. 

You  wonder  why  I  say  nothing  of  Eng- 
land? Ah!  England  knows  you  already. 
England  has  known  you  long.  You  can- 
not surprise  England.  She  knows  you 
as  the  mother  knows  her  son  or  daugh- 
ter; but  to  the  French  you  are  a  mystery, 
a  mystery  that  has  come  to  help,  an  angel 
in  a  khaki  shirt  and  a  slouch  hat  and  a 
strange  voice. 

Don't  you  understand? 

She  prays  for  you.  She  would  pray  to 
you  if  she  were  not  so  shy  in  her  love. 
There  is  a  new  strange  wonder  in  her  eyes, 
and  a  sweet  thrill  all  over  her. 

Oh,  exalt  the  brotherhood  of  nations — 
that  never  before  realized  ideal! 

You  cannot  take  away  from  a  boy  who 
has  grown  up  in  a  free  world  the  deep- 
rooted  idea  that  America  is  and  ever  must 


164     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

be  free.  In  years  gone  by  the  sons  of  this 
soil  have  died  for  freedom,  freedom  for 
themselves,  freedom  for  the  black  man. 
Now  they  fight  and  die  for  the  freedom 
of  the  world. 

Do  you  know  what  it  means  to  be  free? 
Only  the  self -restrained  man  is  free,  for 
lawlessness  is  not  freedom.  Lawlessness 
is  always  in  leash  to  passions  tyrannical. 

In  the  new  America  that  I  see  just  over 
the  edge  of  the  horizon  (for  my  eye 
reaches  farther  than  yours),  there  will  be 
room  for  the  fullest  development  of  the 
individual  idea,  while  the  idea  of  social  re- 
sponsibility will  make  it  stable.  Hitherto 
individuality  has  run  rampant.  Witness 
the  hoarding  of  food  by  a  few,  while  many 
go  without.  Watch  the  clash  and  strug- 
gle of  each  interest  to  take  some  advantage 
for  itself  out  of  this  tragic  opportunity. 

Before   the  war  is   ended  the  hearts 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  165 

of  men  must  work  in  harness  with  their 
minds.  The  old  generation  is  dying  off, 
the  generation  whose  initiative  girdled 
the  continent  with  railroads,  spurred  by 
the  hope  of  personal  gain.  The  new  men 
who  will  follow  the  old  "captains  of  in- 
dustry" will  glimpse  a  new  ideal. 

I  am  told  by  one  who  knows  more  than 
I  that  the  men  who  have  made  industrial 
America,  by  their  foresight  and  initiative, 
were  guided  and  inspired  by  Beings  who 
used  them  and  their  ambitions  for  world 
purposes  beyond  their  comprehension. 


166     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


A  RAMBLING  TALK 

November  15 1 1917. 

I  AM  not  in  a  literary  mood  to-night, 
so  I  may  talk  in  a  rambling  way. 

I  wonder  if  you  know  the  seriousness 
of  the  enterprise  which  America  has  un- 
dertaken. You  think  you  do.  But  before 
the  matter  is  all  threshed  out  at  the  end 
you  may  have  surprises  in  store. 

Do  not  worry  about  your  things  in  Lon- 
don. London  is  large,  and  a  good  many 
bombs  can  fall  without  destroying  any 
great  portion  of  it. 

Yes,  I  say  emphatically  again  what  I 
said  some  two  years  and  a  half  ago,  that 
there  will  be  internal  troubles  in  Ger- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  167 

many — and  in  other  places,  too.  The 
world  is  going  to  be  made  over.  Do  not 
be  afraid.  The  making  over  of  the  world 
will  not  hurt  you. 

Humanity  is  so  afraid  of  change !  The 
race  has  gone  through  many  changes — 
some  of  them  in  prehistoric  times — more 
dramatic  than  the  present  change.  Hu- 
manity has  a  long  history,  and  little  of  it  is 
recorded  in  books  that  you  can  read. 

Yes,  the  world  will  be  united,  and  the 
world  will  be  cut  up.  That  sounds  like 
a  paradox,  perhaps. 

As  I  am  resting  to-night,  I  may  take 
the  liberty  of  being  disconnected.  You 
ought  always  to  live  in  a  quiet  place  like 
this,  a  little  remote  from  the  centre  of 
things.  You  do  not  belong  in  the  bustle 
and  crowd  downtown,  either  in  New  York 
or  any  other  large  city.  All  those  who 
have  developed  their  inner  senses  should 


168    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

live  a  little  apart.  That  does  not  mean 
that  they  should  all  become  hermits;  but 
they  should  live  in  the  outskirts.  When 
you  feel  a  desire  for  the  crowd  you  can  go 
down  into  it. 

Tell not  to  worry  because  this 

book  is  going  slowly.  You  are  not  work- 
ing against  time.  The  world  will  go  on, 
and  you  will  go  with  it.  Make  no  mistake 
about  that.  The  world  is  going  very  fast. 
All  these  new  "psychic"  books  are  an  evi- 
dence that  the  world  is  going  fast.  A  few 
years  ago  no  publisher  would  have  issued 
them. 

I  do  not  wonder  that  your  head  swims 
a  little. 

You  have  been  impressed  by  "losing" 
so  many  personal  friends  since  the  war 
began,  friends  whose  deaths  seemed  un- 
connected with  the  war.  But  they  are  of 
those  who  could  not  adjust  to  the  new 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  169 

world  that  is  coming.  Their  Silent 
Watchers  are  taking  them  out.  You  each 
have  a  Silent  Watcher,  a  something,  a 
part  of  you  that  is  above  and  beyond  you, 
yet  which  is  the  most  real  of  all  the  parts 
of  you. 

The  Watchers  of  the  universe  are 
watching  more  intently  than  usual.  Your 
own  is  watching  you  as  well  as  the  world. 
It  will  give  you  notice  when  any  impor- 
tant action  is  necessary. 

It  seems  as  if  the  world  had  adjusted 
itself  to  the  idea  that  the  dead  may  speak 
with  the  living.  But  that  is  only  the  be- 
ginning of  knowledge. 

When  the  worst  of  the  war  is  over,  and 
men  begin  to  adapt  themselves  to  peace, 
they  will  try  to  know  themselves.  And 
they  will  discover  that  their  bodies  and 
souls  are  only  parts  of  them,  that  they 
exist  on  as  many  planes  of  being  as  there 


170    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

are  planes  of  matter  and  of  subtler  sub- 
stance, and  that  each  of  these  selves  is  as 
real  as  the  personality  they  see  in  the 
mirror.  They  will  learn  to  form  links  be- 
tween them,  to  build  bridges  of  communi- 
cation. Finally  they  will  become  con- 
sciously complete  beings. 

Joy  is  coming  back  to  the  world  some 
day,  such  joy  as  the  world  has  never 
known.  You  will  one  day  be  glad  to  be 
alive  again,  and  I  mean  all  of  you. 

Do  not  fret  because  you  have  to  remain 
in  America.  At  the  moment  America  is 
a  good  place  in  which  to  be.  The  world 
is  opening  its  eyes  at  the  efficiency  of 
America.  She  is  setting  an  example  that 
her  friends  will  be  ashamed  not  to  follow. 
Some  day  she  will  set  the  highest  example 
of  all. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  171 


LETTER  XXII 

THE  LEVER  OF  WORLD  UNITY 

November  19, 1917. 

DO  you  not  see  that  the  unifying  in- 
fluence of  America  is  already  be- 
ing felt  in  the  war?  Do  you  not  see  how 
America,  through  the  President  of  the 
United  States,  is  drawing  the  Allies  to- 
gether? That  is  her  destiny,  to  assemble 
all  nations  in  a  brotherhood  of  democratic 
freedom  and  mutual  helpfulness.  This 
demand  of  President  Wilson  for  a  council, 
for  unified  action  in  prosecuting  the  war, 
is  one  of  the  most  significant  events  in 
history.  For  the  first  time  a  group  of 
friendly  nations  may  really  work  as  one, 


172    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

putting  aside  all  personal  jealousies  and 
fears — for  a  great  world  end. 

It  is  the  lever  of  world  unity  which  shall 
lift  the  burden  of  wastefulness  that  here- 
tofore has  cost  the  world  half  the  fruits 
of  its  labor. 

Oh,  nations  of  Europe,  do  not  fear  the 
great  free  land  across  the  waters!  She 
wants  nothing  of  you,  save  now  the  privi- 
lege of  helping  you  to  save  yourselves,  and 
in  the  future  to  work  with  you  for  the 
ideals  that  will  make  you  all  strong. 

The  Anglo-Saxon  race  must  again  be 
like  one  family,  though  in  two  houses ;  but 
bye  and  bye,  when  America  shall  have 
amalgamated  her  foreign  residents  with 
herself  in  one  indissoluble  race,  she  will 
still  be  your  sister,  O  Britain!  and  you 
two  shall  counsel  together  for  the  further 
enlightening  of  the  world. 

Sometimes  I  go  high  in  the  etheric  re- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  173 

gions  and  look  down  upon  the  earth,  so 
high  that  the  horizons  bound  one  hemi- 
sphere after  another.  The  horizons  of 
time  are  also  thus  expanded,  and  I  see 
ahead  of  and  behind  the  present  hour.  I 
see  the  causes  that  have  brought  the  world 
to  its  present  impasse.  You  will  have  to 
remove  the  wall  that  separates  you  from 
the  age  of  enlightened  brotherhood. 

You  have  read  about  the  golden  age  of 
the  past.  Did  you  think  it  was  a  fanci- 
ful story,  to  amuse  children  in  the  fire- 
light? I  tell  you  it  will  sometime  be 
realized  again,  and  on  this  earth — now 
rent  by  hatred  and  war. 

You  must  retain  all  you  have  won  from 
the  mines  of  the  earth  and  from  the  activ- 
ity of  your  own  brains.  Inventions  and 
arts,  they  will  all  have  their  place  in  the 
new  age  that  is  coming,  and  hitherto  un- 
imagined  art  and  science  will  add  further 


174,    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

to  the  glory  and  comfort  of  life.  It  will 
be  the  fault  of  your  own  folly  and  blind- 
ness if  you  lose  anything  of  value  to  the 
soul.  The  soul  needs  matter  as  matter 
needs  the  soul.  Because  we  look  forward 
to  an  age  without  hatred  and  wasteful 
division,  we  do  not  look  forward  to  an  age 
of  idleness  and  inertia.  Limitless  will  be 
the  opportunities  for  genius,  for  talent, 
for  ambition. 

The  greatest  aristocracy  of  earth  is  the 
aristocracy  of  mind  and  soul,  and  mind 
and  soul  will  be  cultivated.  The  educa- 
tion of  the  future  will  be  not  only  practi- 
cal but  humanistic;  nothing  will  be  thrown 
away  that  makes  for  beauty  or  for 
thought.  The  treasures  of  dead  lan- 
guages will  not  be  thrown  into  the  dust- 
bin. After  the  labor  necessary  to  provide 
for  the  material  wants  of  the  world,  time 
will  be  left  for  art  and  beauty  and  scholar- 


THE  LiriNG  DEAD  M'AN  175 

ship,  for  social  discussion  and  religious  ex- 
altation. The  mystic  also  will  have  his 
place. 

Three  years  ago  I  would  not  have  dared 
to  prophesy  a  happy  outcome  for  this 
tragic  fracas.  More  than  two  years  ago 
I  told  you  that  the  battle  had  been  won  in 
the  regions  above  the  earth — won  by  the 
powers  of  good,  who  labor  for  the  welfare 
of  mankind.  How  can  you  doubt?  If 
the  war  had  ended  two  years  ago,  the 
world  might  have  gone  on  more  or  less  as 
it  went  before.  But  now  it  can  never  go 
back  to  the  old  selfish  ways.  In  the  need 
that  will  follow  the  war  the  races  will  help 
one  another;  they  will  turn  to  one  another 
as  brothers  and  sisters  turn. 

Never  lose  faith  that  out  of  this  tragedy 
will  come  the  guerdon  of  the  world's  de- 
sire. I  see  it,  I  live  for  it  (for  I  live 
more  vitally  than  you) ;  and  that  you  may 


176    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

see  and  live  for  it  also  I  struggle  against 
the  lightness  of  my  present  body,  that  has 
a  tendency  to  carry  me  away  from  the 
dense  regions  where  you  suffer  and  pray, 
you  men  of  earth. 

You  who  have  followed  me  from  those 
early  days  when  I  wrote  you  letters  from 
the  lower  astral  world,  describing  as  a 
traveller  in  a  strange  country  the  things 
I  had  seen ;  you  who  followed  me  through 
the  hells  of  astral  turmoil  during  the  early 
months  of  the  war,  follow  me  yet  a  little 
further.  I  will  show  you  the  way  as  it 
has  been  shown  to  me.  And  you  will 
walk  in  that  way,  though  stumbling  at 
first  and  groping  for  the  thread  of  pur- 
pose through  the  labyrinth  of  reconstruc- 
tion, in  the  days  that  shall  be  called  days 
of  peace.  For  perfect  peace  will  not  come 
at  once.  You  will  have  to  work  for  it, 
as  you  have  worked  for  triumph  in  war. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  177 

But  if  you  have  faith,  you  will  ride  the 
stormy  waters  into  the  haven  of  a  new 
earth.  And  a  new  heaven  will  spread 
above  the  earth,  for  heaven  is  largely 
peopled  from  below;  it  recruits  its  popula- 
tion from  below.  No  new  angels  are  be- 
ing created  now.  The  outgoing  Breath 
rests,  and  the  indrawing  Breath  is  about 
to  begin.  You  who  have  practised  "yogi 
breathing"  know  how  difficult  it  is  to  hold 
the  breath  out  for  more  than  a  short  time. 
It  can  only  be  done  by  force  of  will.  The 
tendency  is  to  return,  as  the  tendency  in 
the  race  is  to  return  towards  the  Source 
from  which  it  came.  It  is  therefore  I  say 
that  you  cannot  retard,  save  for  a  little 
while,  the  flow  of  the  race-breath  towards 
harmony  and  peace  and  love. 

This  struggle  of  men  with  each  other 
in  the  selfishness  of  separation  is  like  the 
struggle  of  the  yogi  not  to  inbreathe — the 


178    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

young  and  inexperienced  yogi;  for  the 
wise  one  breathes  at  stated  intervals,  and 
knows  when  the  period  is  full. 

The  race  knows.  It  will  follow  the  law 
of  the  outflow  and  inflow.  You  cannot 
prevent  it.  So  yield  yourselves  to  the 
current  that  would  carry  you  back  to  God. 

It  will  not  be  a  hurried  journey,  for  the 
inflowing  breath  is  measured  too.  There 
will  be  time  for  labor  and  for  rest,  and  to 
gather  flowers  by  the  way. 

Do  you  fear  the  return  to  God,  how- 
ever slow  it  may  be?  I  who  have  tasted 
death  know  there  is  nothing  to  fear;  and 
I  who  have  tasted  the  new  life  tell  you 
there  is  everything  to  hope. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  179 


LETTER  XXIII 

THE  STARS  OF  MAN^S  DESTINY 

November  24, 1917. 

HAS  it  occurred  to  you  that  the 
powers  that  have  in  charge  the 
progress  of  the  world  may  be  obliged  to 
use  methods  repugnant  to  your  desires, 
in  order  to  accomplish  inevitable  purposes 
at  the  time  when  they  are  due  ?  Man,  by 
rebelling  against  the  tendencies  of  cosmic 
progress,  may  retard  it — for  a  time;  but 
when  the  wave  rises  high  enough  it  will 
carry  him  along  against  his  will,  and  in- 
evitable effects  are  produced  in  spite  of 
his  rebellion. 

Take  this  war.     The  hour  had  struck 
on  the  world  clock  when  races  of  men 


180    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

should  work  together  for  a  common  pur- 
pose. They  rebelled  in  their  fear  that 
each  would  not  get  his  share  of  world 
benefits;  so  the  world  was  attacked  by  a 
common  enemy,  and  the  races  have  had  to 
unite  for  a  common  purpose,  that  of  pre- 
serving civilization  from  the  destruction 
that  threatens  it. 

Could  this  war  have  been  prevented? 
By  prevision,  yes.  But  no  one  with  in- 
fluence enough  to  be  heard  respectfully 
had  that  prevision.  Those  who  stand  high 
in  the  world's  regard  have  generally  so 
concentrated  upon  their  individual  work 
and  their  individual  ambitions,  that  they 
have  lost  the  ability  to  see  impersonally 
and  to  see  the  world  as  a  whole.  Some 
can  see  as  a  whole  the  tendencies  of  their 
own  country;  few  can  see  the  world  tend- 
ency. 

And  I  tell  you  now  that  if,  when  this 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  181 

universal  war  is  ended,  the  races  do  not 
recognize  the  necessity  to  unite  in  a  federa- 
tion for  the  good  of  all,  there  will  be  after 
forty  years  little  left  of  all  that  has  been 
accomplished  during  that  marvellous 
nineteenth  century  which  saw  material 
progress  equalling  that  of  the  preceding 
two  thousand  years. 

Can  man  not  see  the  stars  of  his  destiny 
without  being  struck  on  the  head  with  a 
hammer?  If  man  will  not  work  for  the 
good  of  the  whole,  then  the  whole  has  to 
be  threatened.  It  is  so  threatened  now, 
if  you  could  see  it. 


182  LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  XXIV 

MELANCHOLY 

December  23,  1917. 

I  WANT  to  write  about  melancholy, 
not  the  depression  produced  by 
bad  digestion  or  pressure  on  the  nerves, 
but  that  cloud  of  darkness  that  sometimes 
descends  upon  the  most  brilliant  mind  and 
the  stoutest  heart,  making  them  for  a  while 
useless  for  any  purpose — except  that  of 
drawing  knowledge  from  the  experience 
of  melancholy  itself. 

Not  all  sadness  originates  in  the  heart 
that  is  sad,  and  fear,  the  basis  of  melan- 
choly, may  be  suggested  to  a  soul  on  earth 
by  a  soul  beyond  the  earth.  You  do  not 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  183 

realize  what  a  cloud  of  dissatisfied  and 
fearful  souls  this  holocaust  has  let  loose 
in  the  invisible  regions;  they  flock  round 
the  sensitive  souls  upon  the  earth,  longing 
to  "tell  their  troubles,"  longing  for  sym- 
pathy and  help.  They  are  no  more  self- 
reliant  than  many  in  your  world  whose 
very  presence  depresses  a  stronger  fellow 
being. 

Now  whenever  you  feel  that  cloud  of 
melancholy,  stop  and  ascertain  the  cause. 
You  have  observed  the  workings  of  sug- 
gestion. If  you  find  nothing  in  your  en- 
vironment or  circumstances  to  fill  you  with 
hopelessness,  would  it  not  be  safe  to  as- 
sume— unless  you  are  bilious — that  the 
cloud  gathered  elsewhere  and  merely  de- 
scended upon  you? 

The  student  who  hopes  some  day — 
though  maybe  many  lives  in  the  future — 
to  achieve  adeptship,  may  as  well  begin 


184    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

now  to  control  and  direct  his  thoughts  and 
feelings. 

You  need  not  be  melancholy  unless  you 
want  to  be.  There  are  texts,  mantras, 
adages,  even  copy-book  maxims  you  can 
recall  and  meditate  upon,  that  will  drive 
away  the  worst  fit  of  the  blues.  Here 
are  a  few: 

Pleasure  and  pain  are  opposite  expres- 
sions of  one  force. 

I  am  a  part  of  God,  and  no  harm  can 
overtake  God. 

What  is  the  truth  hidden  in  this  well 
of  discontent? 

If  I  go  deep  enough  into  this  midnight 
earth,  I  shall  come  out  on  the  other  side 
where  the  sun  shines. 

I  was  happy  yesterday,  and  I  am  still 
I. 

A  frightened  dog  will  never  scare  away 
a  robber. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  185 

If  all  these  ills  befall  me,  it  will  be  an 
exercise  of  power  to  conquer  them. 

—  Not  very  profound,  perhaps;  but 
you  can  write  better  ones  if  you  wish.  I 
am  merely  illustrating  one  process  of. 
shaking  off  the  burden  of  dread. 

Why  should  you  men  dread  anything? 
Even  death  is  only  dreadful  when  you 
are  afraid  of  it. 

The  Masters  enjoy  difficulties.  They 
are  the  acid  that  tests  the  gold  of  their 
mastership. 

And  speaking  from  a  lower  plane,  there 
is  pleasure  in  doing  any  difficult  thing. 
Why,  in  the  writing  of  a  big  novel  there  is 
more  actual  work,  mental  and  physical, 
than  in  overcoming  some  great  misfortune, 
It  is  less  work  to  go  out  and  overcome  a 
threatened  misfortune  than  it  is  to  write 
a  short  story. 

How  anybody  in  good  health  and  with 


186    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

even  ordinary  ability  can  yield  to  melan- 
choly is  a  question  for  a  philosopher. 

I  am  not  talking  now  of  grief  for  dead 
friends,  or  for  false  friends,  which  grief 
is  far  worse;  but  of  the  fear  of  some 
imaginary  disaster  which  in  all  probabil- 
ity will  never  happen. 

The  surest  way  to  attract  disasters  is 
to  imagine  them.  You  can  create  almost 
anything  if  you  imagine  it  strongly 
enough — even  joy  and  courage. 

A  Master  once  told  me  that  the  con- 
trol and  exorcism  of  melancholy  was  a 
greater  test  of  power  than  the  control  of 
desire. 

Both  often  come  from  outside,  are  sug- 
gested to  the  receptive,  passive  mind. 
Now  the  Master  entertains  only  those  sug- 
gestions that  can  strengthen  his  purposes. 
If  you  have  a  friend  who  makes  you 
courageous  by  his  very  presence,  cultivate 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  187 

his  society.  If  you  have  a  friend  who 
makes  you  melancholy,  either  teach  him 
better  or  get  rid  of  him;  send  him  to  a  doc- 
tor. 

What  is  the  use  in  our  talking  about 
occult  power  if  we  have  not  power  over 
our  moods?  Practise  on  moods.  As  an 
exercise,  some  time  when  you  are  active, 
force  yourself  to  be  lazy.  When  you  are 
lazy  and  not  tired,  force  yourself  to  be 
active.  Natural  fatigue  should  not  be 
pressed  too  far,  it  is  a  mere  reaction;  but 
indolence  is  not  fatigue.  It  is  in  the 
physical  what  melancholy  is  in  the  mental. 

As  another  exercise,  when  your  mind 
circles  round  and  round  something,  switch 
it  off  as  you  would  switch  off  an  electric 
light.  Turn  and  think  of  something  else. 
You  can  do  it. 

And,  by  the  way,  one  of  the  best  cures 
for  melancholy  is  an  hour  of  mathematical 


188    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

calculations.  I  defy  anybody  to  be 
melancholy  in  the  arms  of  geometry  or 
trigonometry.  Why?  You  cannot  think 
in  mathematical  terms  and  of  yourself  at 
the  same  time.  People  always  think  of 
themselves  when  they  are  melancholy. 

But  you  tell  me  that  you  became  melan- 
choly the  other  day  in  thinking  about  a 
friend  who  had  lost  her  job.  Think 
again.  By  wondering  what  you  could  do 
for  this  friend  arid  whether  you  could  af- 
ford it,  you  began  to  fear.  ...  Is  it  not 
so? 

You  may  be  sad  because  a  friend  is  in 
trouble,  but  you  cannot  be  melancholy  for 
anybody  but  yourself. 

Another  can  make  you  melancholy  by 
making  you  morbid  and  fearful. 

Our  thoughts  are  so  chained  to  our  ego 
that  it  is  difficult  for  them  to  escape  for 
long.  But  are  you  ever  melancholy 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  189 

when  creating  imaginatively  a  scene  in  a 
book?  Could  you  be  melancholy  while 
figuring  the  "polar  elevation"  of  a  planet, 
or  computing  one  of  those  converse  "pri- 
mary directions"?  I  see  you  smile. 
When  you  are  engaged  with  figures  you 
forget  yourself.  Now  take  my  advice. 
When  auto-suggestion  is  powerless  to  con- 
quer melancholy,  draw  up  an  astrological 
figure  in  a  low  latitude  with  that  table  of 
oblique  ascensions  that  I  saw  you  using 
yesterday,  and  work  out  the  converse  pri- 
maries and  the  longitude  of  Vulcan. 

You  remind  me  that  when  on  earth  I 
had  small  interest  in  astrology.  But  I 
am  talking  about  mathematical  calcula- 
tions. 


190  LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  XXV 

COMPENSATORY  PLAY 

February  1,  1918. 

I  HAVE  looked  in  on  you  occasion- 
ally during  the  last  few  weeks, 
pleased  with  your  resting  for  a  time. 

The  amhitious  and  energetic  are  prone 
to  underestimate  the  value  of  occasional 
idleness.  You  cannot  run  even  a  machine 
all  the  time  without  oil  and  rest.  Neither 
can  the  most  vigorous  engineer-soul  run 
its  brain  and  body  too  long  without  letting 
them  cool.  The  farmer  knows  when  to 
let  a  field  lie  fallow. 

"After  the  war"  it  is  to  be  hoped  that 
the  soldiers  who  have  worked  so  long  at 
one  labor — that  of  war — may  be  given  a 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  191 

period  of  compensatory  play,  doing  noth- 
ing, before  being  replaced  in  the  hive  of 
industry.  Let  them  enjoy  the  breezes 
and  the  perfume  of  idleness  for  a  little 
time ;  the  reaction  from  that  rest  will  send 
them  back  into  the  workshops  with  re- 
newed desire  for  activity.  If  the  world 
has  to  get  along  with  less  for  a  few  weeks, 
that  will  not  hurt  the  world. 

In  the  years  to  come  there  will  be  more 
rest  and  recreation  in  America.  In 
Europe  there  is  going  to  be  some  degree 
of  fatigue  after  this  war,  and  America 
can  easily  hold  her  own  if  she  carries  a 
lower  steam-pressure. 

The  idle  hours  are  sometimes  as  valu- 
able as  those  that  are  spent  in  labor.  It 
is  in  so-called  idle  hours  that  we  meditate, 
get  acquainted  with  ourselves,  build  air 
castles,  which  are  working-plans  for  our 
edifice  of  the  future.  Day  dreams  are 


192    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

good.  I  had  a  day  dream  during  my  life, 
and  it  was  really  the  working-plan  for  the 
future  I  am  building  now.  I  wanted  to 
get  back  something  I  had  lost,  and  I  have 
got  it  back.  You  wonder  what  it  was? 
I  do  not  mind  telling  you.  In  a  former 
life  I  went  far  along  the  road  towards 
mastership.  Then  once  upon  a  time  I 
slipped  back  a  long  way.  My  day  dream 
was  to  recover  that  lost  ground,  and  I 
have  recovered  much  of  it  out  here. 

If  I  had  not  left  the  world  with  that  day 
dream  vivid  in  my  consciousness,  I  should 
not  have  made  the  progress  and  the  recov- 
ery I  have  made. 

I  was  talking  the  other  day  with  an  old 
friend — a  very  dear  old  friend — who  came 
out  here  a  year  or  two  ago,  and  she  and  I 
agreed  that  the  day  dreams  we  had 
dreamed  together  were  among  the  most 
valuable  products  of  our  recent  life. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  198 

She  is  revelling  in  the  recovery  of  her 
own  lost  ground,  and  she  will  run  me  a 
good  race  as  the  years  go  on.  Yes,  one 
can  race  across  recovered  ground  of  adept- 
ship. 

My  friend  said  laughingly  the  other 
day  that  she  had  made  more  plans  since 
coming  out  here  than  she  could  execute  in 
a  long  while. 

"Take  your  time,"  I  advised,  "in  the 
execution.  You  have  all  eternity." 

She  looked  at  me  in  the  old  way  I  re- 
member so  well,  and  said: 

"Time  may  be  made  for  slaves,  but 
eternity  is  made  for  masters." 

She  too  is  glad  that  she  came  out.  She 
had  done  one  kind  of  work  long  enough, 
and  is  now  enjoying  another. 

Is  she  helping  me,  you  wonder?  Well, 
no,  unless  you  count  the  pleasure  of  our 
renewed  association  as  a  help.  Why 


should  she  help  me,  or  I  her?  Our  work 
is  our  own. 

You  in  the  world  should  help  each 
other  when  you  can;  but  out  here  we  of 
equal  stature  help  each  other  hy  being. 
That  is  a  good  help,  though,  the  being  to- 
gether sometimes. 

What  a  wonderful  expression,  by  the 
way,  "being  together"!  What  poetry! 
Not  working*  together,  nor  playing  to- 
gether, but  simply  being.  You  must 
often  have  felt  that  joy  when  with  a  loved 
friend.  Words  are  not  necessary  for  that 
enjoyment.  Words  often  lessen  the  en- 
joyment by  the  very  effort  of  uttering 
them.  Effortless  being!  Even  the  birds 
enjoy  it,  and  the  rose  could  give  you  valu- 
able secrets  of  that  joy. 

In  the  world  I  have  heard  busybodies 
say  of  a  beautiful  woman  that  she  did 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  195 

nothing.  What  of  it?  A  rose  does  not 
run  a  sewing-machine,  or  write  books. 

Joy  is  coming  back  to  the  world.  It 
has  been  long  absent.  Being  for  its  own 
sake  has  taken  on  new  meanings  in  the 
minds  of  those  who  are  glad  to  be  still 
alive. 

To  have  passed  through  all  the  perils 
of  a  long  war  and  still  to  "be"  a  living 
man  is  something  to  make  the  soul  wonder. 

The  men  who  have  fought  in  this  war 
from  the  beginning  should  not  be  crowded 
too  hard  when  at  last  they  can  stretch 
their  limbs  in  the  hammocks  of  peace. 
They  have  earned  the  right.  As  they 
spin  their  soldier  yarns,  gaze  at  them  with 
respect.  They  passed  through  the  shadow 
of  death  for  you.  That  God  has  retained 
them  among  the  active  cells  of  His  body 
is  because  He  has  need  of  them  still;  but 
it  does  not  mean  that  they  should  go  on 


196    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

working  for  you  every  minute.  Suppose 
you  work  for  them  for  a  while.  When 
they  are  rested  they  will  join  you  in  your 
labor. 

Last  night  I  listened  to  two  soldiers 
talking,  and  this  is  what  they  said  to  each 
other: 

"What  will  you  do,  John,  when  it's  all 
over?" 

"I'll  lie  in  the  bath  tub  an  hour  every 
morning,  in  the  warm,  soft,  soapy  water; 
and  in  the  afternoon  I'll  call  on  one  dear 
girl  after  another,  and  drink  tea,  and 
listen  to  their  talk.  And  what  will  you 
do?" 

"Oh,  I'll  just  look  at  my  wife  and  hold 
her  hand." 

Idle  talk,  you  think?  That  depends 
upon  what  you  mean  by  idle  talk.  To 
me  that  talk  was  immensely  significant. 

Soon    after    our   little    skirmish    with 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  197 

Spain  I  remember  hearing  an  active 
woman  say  of  her  husband  that  he  had 
never  been  good  for  anything  since  he 
came  back  from  Cuba. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "he  was  good  for  a 
lot  in  Cuba." 

The  Spanish- American  war!  A  fly 
beside  an  elephant,  as  compared  with  this 
war. 

And  the  German  is  tired,  too.  You 
may  not  have  to  overwork  yourself  to 
keep  up  with  him  after  the  war. 


LETTER  XXVI 

THE  AQUARIAN  AGE 

February  2,  1918. 

YOU  have  wondered  why  the  Masters 
speak  now  of  the  interests  of  the 
common  man,  while  in  former  times  they 
said  little  about  them.  But  do  you  not 
know  that  when  the  need  for  a  thing  is 
come,  the  work  of  the  Masters  with  the 
world  is  to  urge  the  world  in  the  direction 
of  its  destiny? 

You  have  read  of  the  iron  age,  the  gold- 
en age,  etc.,  and  that  the  golden  age  fol- 
lows the  iron.  You  may  have  wondered 
how  two  states  so  utterly  dissimilar  could 
be  juxtaposed.  Now  between  the  iron 
age  and  the  golden  age  there  is  a  period 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  199 

of  transition,  a  period  short  as  compared 
with  one  of  the  great  ages,  for  example 
the  longest  one,  the  golden,  which  is  given 
as  one  million,  seven  hundred  and  twenty- 
eight  thousand  years. 

I  have  not  visited  you  this  evening  to 
announce  that  the  golden  age  is  immedi- 
ately at  hand.  Oh,  no !  But  we  approach 
the  termination  of  a  minor  cycle,  and  the 
period  of  transition  from  the  present  state 
of  the  world  to  the  next  *  will  be  of  about 
one  thousand  years.  That  is  to  say,  this 
period  of  one  thousand  years  will  bring 
us  to  the  middle  of  what  is  called  the 
Aquarian  age,  for  the  half  of  one  of  these 
lesser  Zodiacal  periods  is  approximately 
of  that  length.! 

*  Still  far  short  of  the  golden  age,  probably. 
— E.  B. 

f  This  does  not  correspond  exactly  with  the  pop- 
ular Hindoo  reckoning.  But  automatic  writings 
are  what  they  are.  I  can  cut  out  repetitions,  etc., 
but  I  cannot  rewrite,  add  to,  or  distort. — E.  B. 


200    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

What  is  the  Aquarian  age?  You  know 
the  humanitarian  nature  of  Aquarius.  You 
also  know  the  characteristics  of  the  planet 
Uranus,  to  which  Aquarius  is  now  attrib- 
uted. Well,  the  inference  is  obvious. 
We  shall  have  an  Aquarian  world,  and  a 
world  where  things  will  go  after  the  man- 
ner of  that  strange  and  abrupt  planet 
Uranus. 

The  old-fashioned  world  is  passing 
away,  the  Jupiterian  world,  and  we  are 
entering  upon  a  period  of  change,  politi- 
cal, social,  religious  and  personal.  There 
is  going  to  be  an  attempt  at  a  federation 
of  states,  a  federation  of  souls.  Nothing 
but  this  war  could  have  effected  it — with 
the  suddenness  characteristic  of  that  mys- 
terious planet  Uranus. 

In  the  later  Aquarian  age  the  creative 
will  of  man  will  have  such  scope  as  the 
world  has  not  dreamed  of.  It  will  be  set 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  201 

free  from  the  limitations  which  have  held 
it.  When  all  men  are  assured  of  a  means 
of  livelihood,  how  free  they  will  be  in 
mind!  The  freedom  of  the  past  in  a  free 
country  like  America  is  nothing  like  the 
freedom  which  the  new  age  will  usher  in. 

When  education  is  really  universal,  the 
moral  as  well  as  the  mental  will  be  trained, 
and  new  ideas  will  have  room  to  develop 
in  the  developing  brain. 

Be  not  afraid,  O  world!  Three  years 
ago,  even  we  who  see  far  out  here  had 
grave  doubts  for  the  future  of  your 
planet.  But  the  great  Masters  always  told 
us  that  the  world  would  pass  through  its 
period  of  trial,  still  poised  on  its  old  axis, 
and  that  the  forces  which  make  for  order 
would  triumph  over  the  forces  which  make 
for  disorder.  Have  you  not  noticed  in  the 
psychic  world  a  lessening  of  strain?  Have 
you  not  noticed  an  absence  of  the  hostile 


202    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  adverse  beings  that  in  the  early 
months  of  the  war  seemed  to  threaten  the 
earth  and  you  and  all  men  with  a  tri- 
umphant malice?  That  is  a  straw  which 
shows  the  way  of  "the  winds  that  blow  be- 
tween the  worlds." 

I  am  glad  you  are  a  keen  observer  of 
psychic  states.  That  faculty  of  observa- 
tion will  be  of  use  to  you  in  the  years  that 
are  to  come.  Those  who  cannot  adjust  to 
new  conditions  will  pass  out  for  a  time 
and  return  later  with  the  fresh  outlook  of 
children,  to  take  up  their  experience  in  the 
new  age. 

There  will  be  much  rebellion  in  the  be- 
ginning. Things  are  not  so  stable  as  they 
seemed  four  years  ago.  The  war  has 
proved  that  they  were  not  really  stable. 

The  wave  of  psychic  research  that  is 
now  sweeping  across  the  world  will  wear 
thin  the  veil  between  the  visible  and  the 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  203 

invisible.  More  and  more  men  and  women 
will  live  in  two  worlds  at  the  same  time; 
for  the  two  worlds  occupy  the  same  space, 
and  their  differences  are  differences  of 
consciousness,  of  vibration,  the  latter  in- 
cluding a  difference  in  states  of  matter. 

Men  will  grow  more  magnetic  under 
the  influences  that  will  play  upon  them. 
They  will  affect  each  other  more  and 
more,  and  that  is  one  reason  why  greater 
freedom  will  be  necessary.  With  the 
greater  sensitiveness  which  the  new  time 
will  bring,  it  will  be  more  difficult  for  large 
families  to  live  together  a  common  life. 
While  the  tendency  is  for  all  mankind  to 
be  one  family  in  sympathy,  more  and  more 
it  will  be  recognized  that  each  man  re- 
quires privacy  for  his  best  development. 
The  tyranny  of  the  family  will  give  place 
to  freedom  in  the  family.  Strip  family 


204    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

life  of  its  tyranny  and  it  may  be  very 
charming. 

The  sensitive  and  highly  charged  beings 
of  the  new  age  would  explode  if  they 
should  be  obliged  to  slit  every  evening 
round  the  family  "centre-table,"  listening 
to  the  maunderings  of  the  least  progres- 
sive among  them,  who  by  reason  of  greater 
age  assumed  the  right  to  lay  down  the  law. 
This  does  not  mean  that  children  will  not 
honor  their  parents;  but  under  the  new 
dispensation  parents  will  honor  their  chil- 
dren's need  for  the  individual  life,  and  will 
give  it  to  them — thereby  securing  their 
own  freedom. 

The  freedom  of  the  later  Aquarian  age 
will  be  manifest  in  the  mind.  "Heresy" 
will  cease  to  exist;  the  word  will  become 
obsolete. 

The  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost  will  be 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  205 

understood  as  the  attempt  to  enchain  the 
will  of  another. 

Great  friendliness  will  result  from  this 
mutual  tolerance.  We  hate  only  those 
whom  we  fear,  and  in  a  tolerant  world 
there  will  be  few  seeds  of  hatred. 

All  men  will  study;  the  school  is  only 
the  first  stage  of  study.  When  man  be- 
comes his  own  schoolmaster  he  makes 
great  strides. 

What  you  know  of  art,  music  and  liter- 
ature can  give  you  but  a  vague  idea  of 
what  these  arts  will  become  in  the  age  that 
is  to  follow.  Take  the  catchwords  of  the 
immediate  past,  impressionism,  for  exam- 
ple. It  will  be  applied  to  all  the  arts. 

Science  is  only  in  its  swaddling-clothes. 
Aquarius  is  a  sign  of  air,  the  old  books  tell 
us,  and  the  air  holds  many  secrets  which 
you  must  take  for  your  own,  not  only  se- 
crets of  transportation  but  psychological 


206    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

secrets.  The  airplane  and  psychical  re- 
search grew  up  together. 

You  have  not  taken  the  last  redoubt  of 
electricity.  That  also  has  treasures  for 
you.  When  you  can  draw  that  from  the 
air  where  it  hides  from  you  and  laughs, 
you  will  have  little  need  of  coal,  and  the 
miners  can  leave  the  bowels  of  the  earth 
and  play  in  the  sunshine  of  the  heights. 

Inventions!  I  see  in  the  "pattern 
world"  I  told  you  about  in  my  first  book 
many  things  that  would  puzzle  you  down 
here.  New  fabrics  will  be  worn  before 
many  years,  and  the  patient  silkworm  will 
not  be  the  aristocrat  it  now  is. 

The  human  ego  is  coming  into  its 
own.  When  it  loses  selfishness  it  will  find 
itself.  That  is  not  a  paradox  for  its  own 
sake,  but  the  statement  of  a  psychological 
fact. 

The  seeming  chaos  will  take  form,  and 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  207 

in  it  you  will  find  new  beauties.  I  will  not 
conceal  from  you  the  knowledge  that 
many  will  use  the  word  chaos  during  the 
reconstruction  period.  But  be  at  peace. 
The  formless  shall  take  on  form.  The 
clairvoyance  that  is  developing  in  man  will 
help  him  to  see,  where  the  eyes  of  his  old 
faith  would  have  been  blind.  He  will 
trust  the  future  and  trust  his  brother,  and 
will  not  be  deceived.  The  intuition  of  the 
soul  will  point  man  to  the  substance  which 
he  needs  for  his  well-being.  Behind  and 
within  the  air  is  the  ether,  which  is  sub- 
stance, which  is  God.  And  man  will  take 
it  for  his  uses,  with  the  consent  of  God, 
who  joys  in  giving  Himself  to  His  chil- 
dren. 

As  I  said  before,  the  Masters  urge  the 
world  along  in  the  direction  of  its  destiny; 
but  they  are  too  wise  to  hurry  it.  They 


208    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

see  the  face  of  the  cosmic  clock,  and  they 
wake  the  world  a  che  hour  of  the  new 
sunrise.  We  are  blest  in  being  their  serv- 
ants. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  209 


LETTER  XXVII 

THE  WATCHERS 

February  3, 1918. 

1  STOOD  one  day  before  a  great  soul 
that  had  renounced  the  rest  in  heav- 
en, and  questioned  him  as  to  the  work 
that  called  us  loudest.  What  do  you  think 
he  said? 

"Labor  with  those  who  fear  for  the  fii- 
ture" 

"Are  there  so  many,  then,  who  look  for- 
ward with  apprehension?"  I  asked. 

"All  those  who  think  and  see  and  have 
responsibilities  are  apprehensive,"  he  re- 
plied. 

Then  I  wandered  here  and  there  about 
America,  looking  in  upon  all  sorts  of  men 


210    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

and  a  few  women.  And  I  read  in  their 
minds  a  great  uncertainty. 

"Sufficient  unto  the  day  is  the  evil 
thereof,"  I  thought  so  intensely  at  them 
that  many  responded  with  a  hopeful  smile. 

Yes,  I  can  win  response  from  many  peo- 
ple when  I  think  strongly  enough  in  their 
company. 

The  faith  of  one  great  soul  out  here  has 
helped  many  to  stand  steady  when  the 
winds  blew  strong  against  them.  He 
knows  that  America  cannot  fail  of  her 
destiny;  but  that  she  may  not  take  a  wrong 
tack,  he  would  guide  the  hand  and  brush 
the  mists  from  before  the  eye  of  the 
skipper. 

There  are  often  mists  before  the  path 
of  the  "ship  of  State"  in  these  grey  days. 
When  Wilson  took  over  the  railroads, 
what  courage  was  there!  When  all  is 
over  there  will  be  many  to  criticize  and 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  211 

blame  him;  but  criticism  and  blame  are 
ever  the  rewards  of  those  who  depersonal- 
ize themselves  and  labor  for  the  good  of 
their  country  or  the  world.  The  man  who 
is  great  enough  to  cast  his  personality 
overboard  is  not  hurt  by  criticism.  It  is 
only  the  personality  that  can  be  hurt.  The 
soul  stands  serene  and  pure  above  the  ad- 
verse storms. 

I  do  not  advise  all  men  to  disregard 
their  personality.  Only  those  who  bear 
great  responsibilities  may  safely  become 
impersonal.  The  small  man,  the  undevel- 
oped man,  could  not  persuade  his  soul  to 
take  the  place  of  his  lesser  self.  For  the 
soul  must  be  persuaded  to  descend  and 
dwell  in  the  personality.  Most  souls  are 
only  partially  incarnated.  The  higher 
self  of  most  men  dwells  above  and  apart. 
It  is  their  Silent  Watcher;  but  it  seldom 
acts  save  to  warn  and  save.  It  leaves  the 


212    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

lesser  self  to  acquire  experience  and  learn 
its  lessons  through  suffering  and  joy, 
through  success  and  failure.  But  when 
the  man  has  so  far  evolved  that  his  acts 
become  of  more  than  personal  significance, 
then  the  soul  may  descend  and  truly  guide 
and  influence  the  man,  for  the  designs  of 
the  soul  are  ever  beyond  the  personal.  It 
is  a  conscious  part  of  the  great  whole,  a 
conscious  part  of  God  whom  it  worships 
and  serves,  however  the  lower  self  may  be 
immersed  in  trivialities  and  blasphemies. 

In  any  man  who  has  not  lost  his  soul  the 
Higher  Watcher  has  an  interest.  For  the 
Watcher  is  One  and  he  is  many.  He  is 
your  link  with  God,  Oh,  men!  He  is  your 
link  with  immortality. 

You  do  not  meet  him  merely  by  dying, 
for  you  may  dwell  long  in  the  astral  and 
lower  mental  world  before  meeting  him 
face  to  face.  But  if  you  can  ascend  after 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  213 

death  to  the  higher  regions,  you  will  find 
him  there  waiting  for  you.  You  may  bring 
to  him  all  the  fine  fruits  of  your  recent 
life,  and  he  will  enjoy  them  with  you. 

I  have  met  my  soul  face  to  face;  but  I 
am  unable  to  remain  in  the  higher  regions 
in  peaceful  contemplation  of  his  beauty 
while  there  is  so  much  work  to  be  done  for 
the  races  on  earth  as  calls  to  me  now.  Bye 
and  bye  I  shall  re-ascend;  but  when  I  go 
to  heaven  for  a  long  sojourn  you  will  hear 
from  me  no  more. 

Yes,  I  too  have  seen  your  soul.  But  I 
need  not  describe  its  face  to  you,  who 
see  it  better  than  I.  Cling  to  it.  The  fail- 
ure of  mortal  friendship  has  no  power  to 
shatter  the  faith  of  one  who  can  reach  to 
his  own  Silent  Watcher.  And  the  soul  of 
the  faithless  friend  is  pure  as  his  own,  and 
understands  all  things.  Friendships,  like 
loves,  are  made  in  heaven,  and  true  friend- 


214     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

ship  cannot  die.  Its  roots  are  deep  in  wa- 
ters of  eternity.  It  is  deathless  as  the 
Ygdrasil,  and  its  roots  are  also  above  and 
its  branches  below. 

But  it  is  better  to  fail  in  business  than 
to  fail  in  friendship. 

If  a  man  is  great  and  strong  enough, 
he  may  draw  down  his  soul  to  dwell  with 
him  wherever  he  may  be.  ,  Then  the  man 
is  a  whole  man,  he  is  an  adept.  Lincoln 
is  such  a  man,  such  a  soul.  He  has  become 
one  with  his  Higher  Watcher,  and  the  two 
that  are  one  can  work  even  in  the  regions 
of  the  astral.  But  such  a  marriage  of 
heaven  and  earth  is  uncommon,  as  adepts 
are  uncommon. 

Your  father  in  heaven  is  one  with  the 
Father,  and  if  you  are  really  one  with 
your  father  in  heaven  he  can  dwell  with 
you  even  on  earth. 

The  higher  souls  of  men  are  closer  to 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  215 

men  now  than  they  have  been  for  ages. 
The  doors  have  been  opened.  Grief  and 
terror  and  pain  and  devotion  to  ideals  of 
duty  have  raised  the  race  of  men  in  three 
and  a  half  years  as  it  could  not  have  been 
raised  in  a  hundred  years  of  peace.  If  the 
race  falls  back  now,  n\will  be  a  lost  oppor- 
tunity. But  the  race  will  not  fall  back. 


216    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 


LETTER  XXVIII 

A  RITUAL  OF  FELLOWSHIP 

February  8, 1918. 

I  HAVE  been  waiting  for  you  half  an 
hour,  as  you  sat  sewing  a  seam  and 
thinking  of  your  friends  in  France.  It 
warms  the  heart  now  to  think  of  France. 
The  tie  between  the  two  great  republics 
is  being  drawn  closer  and  closer. 

Shall  I  tell  you  an  occult  secret?  The 
French  mixed  their  blood  with  ours  long 
ago,  and  we  have  loved  them  ever  since. 
We  are  now  mixing  our  blood  with  the 
blood  of  France,  and  France  will  love  us 
in  the  days  that  are  to  come. 

It  is  a  ritual  of  fellowship,  that  mixing 
of  blood.  English  and  French  and  Amer- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  217 

icans  and  Italians,  Irish,  Scotch,  and  all 
the  others.  Is  there  not  a  foundation  for 
brotherhood?  The  blended  blood  cries 
from  the  ground  for  love. 

I  see  in  the  eyes  of  the  French  their 
feeling  for  our  men  as  they  march  by,  or 
help  in  the  little  ways  to  which  American 
boys  are  accustomed.  Never  again  will 
they  look  upon  us  as  queer  people  from 
beyond  the  sea. 

We  have  travelled  in  their  country  and 
spent  our  money  and  swaggered  and 
talked  through  our  noses ;  but  now  we  are 
living  and  dying  with  them,  and  we  are 
brothers  of  mixed  blood. 

Yes,  go  back  to  France  when  you  can. 
They  always  loved  you  because  you  loved 
them,  but  now  you  will  see  that  they  also 
love  your  native  land. 


LETTER  XXIX 

RECRUITING  AGENTS 

February,  1918. 

FOR  a  day  or  two  after  America  de- 
clared that  a  state  of  war  existed,  I 
spent  most  of  my  time  in  going  about 
this  country,  studying  conditions  in  both 
worlds.  Even  before  that  survey  I  had  a 
general  idea  of  how  matters  stood  in  those 
worlds ;  but  I  wanted  to  freshen  my  mem- 
ory, for  I  had  a  great  idea.  Many  times 
during  my  life  on  earth  I  had  told  myself 
that  I  had  a  great  idea,  and  sometimes  I 
put  it  into  execution,  and  sometimes  I 
failed  in  doing  so.  But  this  time  I  was  de- 
termined there  should  be  no  failure. 

When  I  had  seen  from  my  survey  that 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  219 

the  materials  were  all  at  hand,  I  sought 
out  a  great  man,  spirit,  or  whatever  you 
choose  to  call  him. 

Then  together  we  mapped  out  our  cam- 
paign. Here  are  the  main  points  of  it: 

Conservation  —  where  the  negative 
forces  should  be  applied. 

Construction — with  our  positive  forces. 

Coordination  —  with  the  synthetic 
forces. 

We  marshalled  a  group  of  those  strong- 
minded,  strong-willed  men  and  women 
who  had  been  out  here  long  enough  to 
know  not  only  their  way  about,  but  how 
to  impress  their  thoughts  upon  material- 
bodied  men  and  women.  These  were  dis- 
patched here  and  there,  to  think,  think, 
think,  in  the  neighborhood  of  senators  and 
congressmen,  chiefs  of  industry  and  mem- 
bers of  the  general  public.  The  burden 
of  their  impressed  thought  was  conserva- 


220     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

tion  of  food,  conservation  of  expenditure, 
conservation  of  all  material  that  would  be 
needed  for  the  activities  of  war. 

Others  who  were  filled  with  a  great  love 
for  the  land  of  their  latest  birth,  America, 
went  about  in  bands  instilling  their  pa- 
triotic enthusiasm  into  the  hearts  and 
minds  of  those  millions  who  had  too  long 
taken  America  as  a  matter  of  course.  They 
sang  patriotic  songs,  and  though  they 
could  not  be  heard  by  the  ears  of  earth, 
the  spirit  of  their  singing  could  be  felt, 
and  they  accomplished  much. 

Then  others,  the  wisest  among  old  lead- 
ers of  men,  were  busy  in  quelling  disorder, 
in  suppressing  discontent  with  the  war. 
Wherever  a  group  of  wild-eyed,  peace- 
prating  "idealists"  got  together  to  talk 
twaddle,  there  was  one  or  more  of  these 
unseen  auditors  to  put  the  brakes  on  re- 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  221 

sponsive  enthusiasm  to  the  dangerous 
principles  enunciated. 

I  will  not  bore  you  by  giving  all  the  de- 
tails of  this  plan  of  help  which  we  labored 
to  make  effective.  But  there  were  enrolled 
more  than  one  million  beings  out  here  who 
have  pledged  themselves  to  serve  until 
their  services  are  no  longer  required. 
That  may  not  seem  to  you  a  great  number 
to  help  invisibly  a  nation  of  more  than  one 
hundred  millions;  but  one  to  every  hun- 
dred is  enough  among  the  active  workers, 
for  each  is  free  to  choose  assistants  among 
those  younger  in  earth  experience. 

To  the  one  who  acted  as  our  command- 
er-in-chief,  the  generals  of  this  auxiliary 
army  made  reports,  and  many  were  the 
strange  orders  he  gave  them.  But  no  one 
questioned  his  wisdom,  and  the  results 
have  proved  it  over  and  over. 

One  time  when  I  wanted  to  go  North, 


222     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

he  sent  me  to  the  South,  and  in  Mobile  I 
learned  why  my  course  was  changed. 

It  is  a  wonder  that  the  legislators  at 
the  various  capitols  have  not  "seen  ghosts" 
during  the  last  months.  Perhaps  they 
have.  But  men  are  becoming  accustomed 
to  the  idea  of  us  now.  That  is  one  of  the 
good  results  of  the  war.  In  looking  across 
the  border  for  their  loved  ones,  they  may 
encounter  the  Teachers,  even  the  angels 
of  their  loved  ones,  and  be  enlarged  in 
mind. 

I  had  an  amusing  experience  in  the  city 

of .  There  is  a  "pacifist"  there  who 

has  a  considerable  influence  among  the 
members  of  a  certain  set,  and  I  found  that 
when  he  began  one  of  his  "philosophic" 
talks  to  one  or  more  persons,  for  he  has 
not  lectured  publicly,  I  could  bewilder  him 
by  speaking  in  his  ear  and  answering  his 
questions  in  a  way  that  made  him  wonder. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  223 

For,  strange  to  say  perhaps,  he  could  hear 
me.  But  not  believing  in  the  possibility 
of  communication  between  the  worlds,  he 
thought  he  was  having  "clairaudient  hal- 
lucinations," and  consulted  a  doctor  who 
told  him  that  he  had  been  brooding  too 
much  about  the  war.  The  doctor,  who  was 
not  a  pacifist,  advised  our  friend  to  take 
up  ornithology. 

Yes,  he  is  young — and  will  be  young  for 
many  incarnations. 

We  have  also  done  our  share  of  recruit- 
ing. Those  who  were  later  called  by  the 
draft  were  merely  encouraged;  but  there 
were  others  who  needed  only  the  dream 
we  sent,  or  the  thought  we  whispered,  to 
move  them  in  the  right  direction;  and 
when  a  young  man's  country  is  at  war,  the 
right  direction  is  generally  towards  the 
nearest  recruiting  station. 

There  was  a  boy  in who  had  been 


224     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

reading  about  France  and  the  fighting  in 
France  with  a  tightening  at  the  heart,  a 
tightening  of  horror.  He  feared  the  draft. 
He  was  not  a  husky  fellow.  His  labors  as 
bookkeeper  in  a  bank  had  not  developed 
his  leg  muscles,  and  he  had  a  capricious 
digestion.  So  he  told  himself  that  he 
would  be  a  failure  as  a  soldier. 

But  one  time  when  in  sleep  he  came  out 
into  our  world,  I  met  him  and  invited  him 
to  take  a  stroll  with  me.  Do  you  think  I 
took  him  to  a  battlefield?  Oh,  no  I  I  took 
him  to  an  exercise  ground.  You  may  won- 
der how  I  could  do  that  at  night;  but  it 
chanced  that  he  had  fallen  asleep  in  the 
daytime.  And  I  made  it  easy  for  him  to 
see  down  into  the  world  he  had  tempo- 
rarily left — to  see  the  exercise  ground.  It 
interested  him. 

And  next  day  the  labor  over  the  ledger 
seemed  duller  and  more  monotonous  than 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  225 

usual.  And  he  overheard  &  girl  say  to  a 
friend  at  the  paying  teller's  window,  that 
a  sallow  faced  clerk  was  not  her  ideal  of 
a  man,  that  she  liked  the  soldier  boys. 

When  he  went  for  a  walk  after  banking 
hours,  I  went  along  with  him,  and  drew 
his  attention  to  some  marching  soldiers 
who  had  a  good  band.  The  boy  went  home 
and  looked  at  himself  in  the  mirror  and 
found  that  he  was  sallow,  and  he  reminded 
himself  that  he  was  a  clerk. 

So  he  enlisted. 

You  may  wonder  why  I  took  so  much 
trouble  to  gather  one  uninteresting  young 
man  into  the  fold  of  Uncle  Sam's  army, 
when  we  had  so  many  subordinate  workers 
at  that  business.  But  I  had  known  the 
boy's  father  twenty  years  before,  and 
something  he  had  said  influenced  me  to- 
wards a  decision  that  enlightened  my 
whole  after  life. 


226     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

When  that  boy  returns  he  will  be  no 
longer  sallow-faced,  and  he  will  be  a  hero 
— not  a  clerk. 

I  like  to  pay  my  debts. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  227 


LETTER  XXX 

THE  VIRUS  OF  DISRUPTION 

February  16, 1918. 

FREEDOM  with  self-restraint  and 
social  responsibility"  would  be  a 
good  motto  for  Americans  in  the  years 
that  are  before  them. 

The  underground  and  overground  prop- 
aganda of  Bolshevism,  Anarchism,  etc., 
inspired  and  fed  by  the  forces  of  destruc- 
tion, can  be  successfully  combated  by  the 
spirit  of  order,  of  restraint,  of  responsi- 
bility to  the  body  politic. 

The  end  of  this  war  will  not  be  the  end 
of  confusion.  The  world-soul  has  been 
inoculated  with  the  virus  of  disruption, 
and  it  will  need  the  wills  of  millions  work- 


228    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

ing  together  for  a  common  end  to  expel 
the  poison  and  restore  the  body  of  human- 
ity to  health  and  security. 

America  as  we  know  it  was  born  of  pro- 
test against  oppression,  and  the  love  of 
liberty,  father  and  mother,  positive  and 
negative,  in  the  old  days.  If  now  the 
protest  against  oppression  degenerates 
into  the  protest  against  all  restraint,  and 
if  the  love  of  liberty  degenerates  into  the 
love  of  license,  then  I  may  tell  you  that 
those  who  cannot  govern  themselves  have 
to  be  governed  from  outside. 

The  human  race  is  passing  through  a 
period  of  initiation.  The  morally  weak 
and  the  weak  of  will  are  always  in  danger 
of  being  carried  away.  The  spirit  of  de- 
struction finds  them  ready  tools  with 
which  to  work  its  will* 

The  kingdom  of  heaven  is  not  immedi- 
ately at  hand,  and  full  seven  years  will  be 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  229 

needed  to  settle  the  consciousness  of  man- 
kind after  the  shaking-up  it  has  received. 
The  dregs,  as  usual  in  such  cases,  have 
risen  and  diffused  themselves  throughout 
the  fluid  of  the  cup. 

If  there  were  only  a  dozen  people  in  the 
United  States  who  understood  or  could 
be  made  to  understand  the  occult  forces 
behind  the  present  universal  unrest,  and  if 
those  twelve  could  work  together  with 
unity  of  purpose,  some  here,  some  there, 
with  the  pen,  the  voice  and  the  will,  under 
a  leader,  those  twelve  might  lead  the  peo- 
ple out  of  the  wilderness.  But  where  are 
they?  Every  leader  knows  that  in  unity 
is  strength. 

And  I  may  mention  the  opposite  law, 
that  in  disunity  is  disintegration. 

Bolshevist  and  anarchist!  Finding  the 
world  not  to  their  liking,  and  being  unable 
to  adjust  to  environment  so  as  to  satisfy 


230     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

their  love  of  power,  or  their  love  of  ease, 
these  people  have  devoted  themselves  to 
destroying  the  society  in  which  they  are 
unsuccessful.  They  believe  themselves 
right.  There  is  so  much  of  the  divine  in 
almost  the  worst  man,  that  he  has  to  be- 
lieve he  is  working  for  the  right  even  when 
he  is  working  evil.  It  is  necessary  for  a 
murderer  to  justify  his  act  in  order  to  do 
it,  unless  he  is  swept  away  by  blind  pas- 
sion, and  then  he  seeks  to  justify  passion 
itself. 

The  heart  of  man  is  superior  to  the 
brain  of  man.  Almost  anyone  can  feel  a 
good  impulse ;  but  the  man  who  can  think 
independently  of  his  passions  is  rare  and 
isolate.  Popular  education  does  not  mean 
universal  reasoning  power.  But  popular 
education  is  the  beginning;  it  is  the  seed 
out  of  which  will  grow  the  tree  of  world- 
intellect. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  231 

I  have  told  you  of  the  reign  of  love  that 
is  at  length  to  comfort  the  hearts  of  man- 
kind; but  I  have  not  told  you  that  it  is 
coming  to-morrow  or  the  next  day. 

If  you  can  get  away  from  the  personal 
and  the  temporary,  and  see  life  and  the 
movements  of  cycles  in  perspective,  you 
will  see  how  temporary  unrest  is  only  a 
stage  by  the  way. 

He  who  adjusts  to  environment  adjusts 
even  to  unrest.  Remember  that.  The 
supple  tree  feels  the  wind,  but  its  roots 
cling  tight  to  the  soil  and  the  rock  of  in- 
dividuality. 

Be  like  the  supple  tree,  America.  In 
the  wind  that  sweeps  across  the  world, 
cling  tight  to  the  soil  of  freedom  and  the 
rock  of  social  responsibility.  You  can 
save  the  world  if  you  do  not  lose  your 
hold  on  the  soil  and  the  rock  that  have 
steadied  and  sustained  you. 


282     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

The  anxious  eyes  of  a  Europe  in  con- 
flagration are  turned  in  your  direction, 
your  friends  with  hope,  your  enemies  with 
dread.  When  you  threw  the  weight  of 
your  strong  young  body  into  the  scales  of 
justice,  you  changed  the  destiny  of  the 
world.  Yes,  it  was  your  destiny  to  do  it. 

All  you  who  have  studied  "occultism," 
which  merely  means  knowledge  too  pro- 
found to  be  understood  by  the  material- 
minded, — you  who  have  studied  occultism 
know  that  to  the  candidate  for  initiation 
come  trials  and  tests,  and  that  without 
them  he  cannot  go  on.  Think  of  the  hu- 
man race  as  a  candidate  for  initiation.  If 
your  mind  is  developed  beyond  the  minds 
of  your  fellows — you,  and  you,  and  you — 
do  not  forget  that  you  are  united  to  them 
by  an  indissoluble  bond.  You  cannot 
break  away  from  the  race.  You  may  rise 
above  it  as  the  Master  does,  or  sink  be^ 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  233 

neath  it  as  the  lost  souls  do;  but  the  link 
between  you  and  those  other  fragments  of 
God  can  only  be  broken  at  your  peril. 

The  Master  works  for  the  race,  knowing 
well  that  he  cannot  safely  ignore  it.  Even 
if  he  made  himself  equal  with  the  gods  and 
desired  to  build  a  world  of  his  own,  he 
would  have  to  take  the  substance  for  it 
from  the  common  reservoir  of  substance. 
If  like  a  spider  he  could  spin  his  world- 
web  from  himself,  he  would  have  to  eat 
the  common  substance  to  sustain  himself 
in  his  power. 

You  may  as  well  love  the  race,  for  you 
cannot  escape  it  altogether.  Even  if  you 
rise  and  dwell  in  the  thin  air  of  the  king- 
dom of  the  mind,  you  will  feel  the  wind- 
currents  from  your  fellows  above  and  be- 
low. Some  will  deny  this,  but  I  have  made 
the  test. 

I  recently  sought  a  high  place  for  rest. 


234    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

But  the  needs  of  the  world  pulled  me  back. 
The  greatest  need  of  the  world  for  the 
next  few  years  will  be  the  knowledge  of 
the  law  of  conservation.  Retain,  O  world  I 
the  treasures  you  have  labored  for 
throughout  the  centuries,  and  discard 
only  the  worn-out  garments  and  utensils. 
The  wooden  plough  and  the  wooden  shoe 
are  no  longer  needed  in  a  wisely  ordered 
world;  but  the  sciences  and  the  arts  you 
will  need,  and  the  Gothic  cathedrals  you 
destroy  can  never  be  replaced. 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  235 


LETTER  XXXI 

THE  ALTAE  FIRE 

February  18, 1918. 

ALWAYS  the  pull  of  the  opposites! 
In  all  the  talk  of  internationalism, 
let  us  not  forget  nationalism.  The  enemy 
of  the  present  hour  made  great  use  of  it, 
but  he  did  not  reckon  with  its  opposite.  It 
is  not  true  internationalism  to  support 
spies  as  commercial  agents  in  all  the  coun- 
tries of  earth. 

America  of  all  nations  is  best  fitted  to 
carry  on  her  standards :  Each  for  all,  and 
all  for  each. 

But  in  her  love  for  other  races,  for 
other  nationalities,  let  her  not  forget  to 
strengthen  and  uphold  her  own. 


236    LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

"My  Country,  'tis  of  Thee!"  As  that 
sentiment  grows  ever  stronger  in  your 
heart,  so  will  your  justice  to  other  nations 
make  you  recognize  that  their  countries 
are  of  them.  For  your  country  was  not 
built  upon  the  idea  of  world  domination, 
but  of  freedom — for  yourselves  and  for 
all  men. 

Your  president  has  been  called  a  maker 
of  phrases.  That  is  good.  A  man  who 
can  make  phrases  that  shall  carry  them- 
selves around  the  world  can  influence  the 
thought  of  the  world. 

"To  make  the  world  safe  for  democ- 
racy." Those  words  will  go  down  the  cen- 
turies. 

You  Americans  who  love  the  storied 
lands  of  Europe,  do  not  underestimate 
this  land  that  gave  you  birth.  It  is  great 
as  the  greatest  now,  and  its  clock  has  not 
yet  struck  twelve  noonday.  It  is  still 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  M'AN  237 

morning  in  America.  The  present  day 
American  is  the  ancestor  of  the  man  of  the 
Sixth  Race.  From  many  stocks  he  will 
spring,  and  his  blood  will  be  blended  from 
that  of  all  the  races  which  have  preceded 
him.  He  will  be  unique  in  his  qualities. 
No  man  of  the  older  races  can  imitate  him, 
for  his  consciousness  will  be  his  own. 

A  man  is  not,  as  you  have  so  often  said, 
so  many  pounds  of  flesh  and  bone  and 
blood  and  sinew,  but  a  man  is  a  state  of 
consciousness.  It  is  because  you  recog- 
nize their  state  of  consciousness  as  being 
themselves,  that  men  and  women  reveal 
themselves  to  you. 

If — or  when — you  go  back  to  Europe 
to  live,  do  not  forget  your  country.  Do  not 
remain  too  long  away  from  it,  lest  you 
lose  touch  with  that  unique  consciousness 
which  shall  flower  in  the  Sixth  Race. 

Yes,  a  great  art  will  grow  up  in  Amer- 


238     LAST  LETTERS  FROM 

ica.  After  another  fifty  years  it  will  be 
ripe.  Let  us  hope  it  will  not  begin  to  rot 
thereafter,  but  like  a  sound  American  ap- 
ple preserve  its  solidity  for  a  long  time. 

This  war  is  good  for  America.  It  is  not 
well  for  a  race  to  have  so  great  a  material 
success  without  some  pain  and  struggle. 
It  is  pain  that  mellows  the  heart. 

America  has  not  yet  found  her  soul,  but 
she  will  find  it.  Those  Americans  who  are 
now  broken-hearted  are  finding  their 
souls. 

France  found  her  soul  a  long  time  ago, 
and  she  is  now  finding  her  divinity.  Would 
she  have  found  it  but  for  suffering?  The 
Christ  upon  the  cross  is  greater  than  the 
Christ  at  the  marriage  supper  in  Cana  of 
Galilee. 

If  I  had  not  wanted  you  to  write  this 
book,  I  should  have  sent  you  back  to  Lon- 
don, that  you  might  experience  the  strain 


THE  LIVING  DEAD  MAN  239 

of  air  raids  and  insufficient  food.  I  should 
have  sent  you  back  to  France,  that  you 
might  see  and  touch  and  minister  to  the 
wounded. 

Though  you  have  endured  the  strain  of 
the  astral  world  at  war,  you  have  not  yet 
seen  and  touched  and  tasted  the  agony  of 
physical  suffering  that  the  women  of 
France  have  seen  and  touched  and  tasted. 
But  you  cannot  live  and  suffer  in  too 
many  worlds  at  once. 

Do  you  not  think  that  our  American 
boys  who  are  fighting  now  in  France  will 
be  greater  for  the  experience — whether 
they  live  or  die?  Life  in  material  form 
is  not  the  only  life,  and  those  who  make 
the  great  sacrifice  will  gain  more  than  they 
lose.  It  is  sublime  to  die  for  an  ideal.  "To 
make  the  world  safe  for  democracy." 

America  is  better  known  to  Europeans 
now  than  she  has  been  before.  Many  of 


you  will  go  and  come,  as  you  have  done  in 
the  past;  and  a  few  of  you  will  vitalize  the 
mutual  understanding  between  America 
and  Europe.  But  you  can  do  that  only  by 
glorifying  your  own  nationality  in  your 
hearts.  I  do  not  mean  flaunting  it.  Let 
it  burn  as  an  altar  fire,  in  the  secret  tem- 
ple of  your  being. 


THE  END 


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